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The genomic face of immune responses

A critical set of phenomena that ties together various aspects of health interventions, such as drug sensitivity screening, cancer or autoimmune susceptibility screening, infectious disease prevalence and application of pharmacologic or nutrition therapies, is the systems biology of the immune response. For example, the influenza epidemic of 1918, as well as the recent cases of human fatality due to H5N1 (avian flu), both illustrate the potentially dangerous sequence of immune responses to this virus. Also well documented is the only case of spontaneous "immunity" to HIV in humans, shown to be due to a mutation in a surface protein on CD4 T cells, the primary targets of HIV. The immune system is truly a sentinel system of the body, with the result that health and disease are carefully balanced by the modulated response of each of its various parts, which then also act in concert as a whole. Especially in industrialized and rapidly developing economies, the high rate of allergic and reactive respiratory disease, autoimmune conditions and cancers are also in part linked to aberrant immune responses that are elicited as the communities' genomes encounter swiftly changing environments. The causes of perturbed immune responses run the gamut of genome-environment interactions due to diet, supplements, sun exposure, workplace exposures, etc. Public health genomics as a whole will absolutely require a rigorous understanding of the changing face of immune responses.