There has been much information lately on PBS showing that american
natives were decimated by diseases brought by european invaders.
The explanation usually given is that the natives had never been exposed
to these agents and were a "virgin" population
Current immunology dogma suggests that B cell specificity is constantly
arising from processing of pre-existent genes and similarly for the T
cell receptor. Specificity could also arise at the level of peptide
chaperones and MHC antigens which are limited in the peptides they
accept.
Is there any evidence that exposure to the diseases which killed the
natives had altered the immune systems of the europeans - altered the B
cell Ig gene pool, altered the TCR gene pool, selected out MHC genes
which would carry the epitopes of the infectious agents, etc ????
