Why is immunology so complicated?

There are thousands of components to the immune system, and during the course of learning about some of these it can appear that the immune system is far more complicated than necessary for achieving what is, on the surface, the simple task of eliminating an infectious organism. There are a number of reasons why the immune system is complex. The first of these is the desirability of eliminating pathogens without causing damage to the host. Getting rid of a pathogen is theoretically easy. If you had an infection in your liver you could produce a nasty toxin that would kill the pathogen; unfortunately it would also destroy your liver. Killing pathogens is not difficult, but getting rid of pathogens without damaging the host is much more complicated. Imagine if a city in your country was infiltrated by soldiers from another country; you could get rid of the foreign invaders by dropping a nuclear bomb on the city but this would also kill a lot of your compatriots. To go into the city to eliminate or capture the foreign soldiers without causing harm to your compatriots is much more difficult. This analogy raises a major issue concerning the immune system – that of recognition. To eliminate foreign soldiers without killing your own requires that you can tell the two apart. In the same way the immune system must be able to distinguish between pathogens and host cells so that it can direct its destructive powers towards the pathogens. Many of the specialised features of the immune system are involved in recognition of foreign pathogens.
An additional problem facing the immune system is that pathogens come in all shapes and sizes, with different lifestyles and different ways of causing disease. To understand fully the complexity that the immune system must deal with, it is necessary to have some understanding of infectious organisms and the ways in which they cause disease. The rest of this chapter describes how pathogens differ, so that it is possible to get an appreciation of the problems faced by the immune system.