Immune System

If you want to live longer -- avoid heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and cancer -- then pick and choose your foods with care to quiet down parts of your immune system. That's the principle promoted by the founders and followers of anti-inflammatory diets, designed to reduce chronic inflammation in the body. Dozens of books filled with diets and recipes have flooded the market in the last few years, including popular ones by dermatologist Dr. Nicholas Perricone and Zone Diet creator Barry Sears.

First came the stomachaches and low fevers. Then Lance Cpl. Cory Belken broke out in a rash. His temperature shot up to 104.6 degrees. The young man became delirious, telling his mother, Barbara Skaggs, that he wanted to go to the smoking section even though he had never smoked. His blood pressure dropped.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is one of the fastest-evolving entities known. That's why no one has yet been able to come up with a vaccine: The virus mutates so rapidly that what works today in one person may not work tomorrow or in others. A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature confirms that dizzying pace of evolution on a global scale.

Doctors have overcome 30 years of false starts and found success with a new way to fight cancer: using the body's natural defender, the immune system. The approach is called a cancer vaccine, although it treats the disease rather than prevents it. Researchers at a cancer conference in Orlando said Sunday that one such vaccine kept a common form of lymphoma from worsening for more than a year.

Many people who don't protect themselves from the sun may never get skin cancer. And certainly, you can roll the dice if you wish. But there are things I now do regularly to protect myself from it. I don't have to remember to do them; they're automatic. I was never this careful before my husband died of the disease. That tragedy was my motivator. But maybe I could be your motivator -- if you know a little bit about what my husband, Jerry, went through and what I went through as his wife.

In the 1890s, a New York surgeon named William Coley tested a radical cancer treatment. He took a hypodermic needle teeming with bacteria and plunged it into the flesh of patients. After suffering through weeks of chills and fevers, many showed significant regression of their tumors, but even Coley himself could not explain the phenomenon. His experiments were sparked by the observation that certain cancer patients improved after contracting infections.

Until drugs that suppress the body's immune response were introduced in the 1960s, most organ transplants failed. "The drugs are wonderful," says Dr. David Sachs, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and director of the Transplantation Biology Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. "They made transplantation possible." The medications can prevent rejection of the organ that occurs even when it is matched by blood type and the six most important surface proteins, called HLA markers.

Swapping spit: The term takes on a more refined meaning at the new dating site ScientificMatch.com. A prerequisite for signing up -- in addition to having a bit of cash to spare -- involves swishing a cotton swab inside your cheek and mailing a juicy sample of skin cells and saliva. What do you get in return for your DNA-laden drool? A chance at genetic and olfactory harmony. ScientificMatch.

Instead of infiltrating breaks in the skin, HIV appears to attack normal, healthy genital tissue in women, researchers have found. It had been thought that HIV sought breaks in the skin, such as a herpes sore, to gain access to immune-system cells deeper in the tissue. The findings were presented this week at a meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in San Francisco.

WE ALL KNOW that bacteria and other microbes can make us sick. Now, it turns out, they might also make us fat. Recent research comparing the "gut flora" of overweight and slender mice -- as well as people -- showed that the microorganism count varied consistently in the two groups. Plump individuals have more of one kind, leaner types have more of another. The cause-and-effect relationship, if one exists, is not at all clear.