July 2008 end MHT-CET newsletter
Hello students,
The July has left us with good news: 2 students from BiologyForMhtcet.com forums have made it to the medical colleges(MBBS) on basis of their merit! Hearty congratulations to Azhar and me_101. Its nice to see you guyz making it there!
For the ones curious about cut offs to MBBS and BDS colleges through MHT-CET, you can find a somewhat detailed college-wise cut off list here.
Why we don’t immunize a fetus?
You probably know what immunization is and when immunization doses are administered. I have a question. Why a baby can be immunized only after birth? Isn’t the fetus susceptible to diseases when it is in the womb? Few acceptable reasons why a fetus is not immunized are:
- The passive immunity obtained from the mother could destroy the antigen much before than it could evoke an immune response
- The immediate after-effects of immunization such as fever or rashes are harmful to the fetus
- The procedure required to administer immunization shots to the fetus may be complicated, cumbersome and may even require specialized skills that cannot be made available to most people, esp, on a mass scale.
I decided to dig further and found an inconspicuous but amazing paragraph in my Physiology textbook(By Sir Guyton, 11th Ed.). If I were to explain that in lay language, here is how I:
While the thymus is developing, there is a stage in its development where the thymus is learning how to differentiate between self and non-self(foreign) antigens. Any antigen presented to thymus during that stage will be assumed by the thymus to be a self antigen. Hence, the body will never attack those antigens when they are encountered in future. If I were to inject diphtheria toxin into a fetus while its thymus was in that stage of development, the thymus would learn that the diphtheria toxin is a normal constituent of the human body and would never attack it. So when the child grows and if he suffers from diphtheria, the body would not evoke an immune response against the diphtheria toxin. Long story short, the patient dies due to diphtheria!
So do you understand now why we actually don’t immunize a foetus?
Think you can get these MCQs right?
| 1. | Hemophilia can be transmitted by |
| a. | Receiving blood transfusion from a hemophiliac |
| b. | Unsafe sexual acts with a hemophiliac |
| c. | Mutated genes |
| d. | All of the above |
| 2. | Hodgkin’s disease is a type of |
| a. | Carcinoma |
| b. | Lymphoma |
| c. | Sarcoma |
| d. | Leukemia |
| 3. | The definite position of a gene on a chromosome is termed as |
| a. | Locus |
| b. | Focus |
| c. | Spot |
| d. | Gene lat |
Answer key
- c - Mutated genes
- b - Lymphoma
- a - Locus
For any doubts regarding the MCQs, please use the forum.
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