Hi Jeffrey:
I think that oral vaccines have to damage the gut in
some way before the immune response recognizes them as antigens. For
instance, cholera toxin binds to receptors on gut epithelial cells and
screws up their normal functioning, whilst live attenuated vaccines will
invade the gut wall to induce some local disease. In contrast, food is
essentially benign and so fails to elicit immune resonses to it. This
is a very simplistic explanation, and I'm sure the "real" immunologists
out there will have plenty to add.
Regards,
Wayne.
Jeffrey Atkinson wrote:
> To All;
>> I'll be brief because this could be very silly.
>> If at least a humoral immune response is possible by
> ingesting a protein (say an attenuated virus) then why do we not
> raise a response against all foreign ingested proteins?
>> Coming from parts quite distant from immunology.....
>> Jeffrey
> --
>>