Disease bugs come equipped with a whole tool kit of tricks for evading our immune system. Now it seems that turning off just one of them can render bubonic plague harmless. A similar approach might lead to vaccines against many pathogens, including antibiotic-resistant hospital superbugs.
When you recover from an infection, antibodies produced by your long-term immune cells often prevent you catching the same disease again. What enables you to survive that initial infection is “innate” immunity, a fiendishly complicated network of chemicals that recognise foreign invaders, unleash immediate defences against them and marshal long-term immunity.
Yersinia pestis, the…
