passive immunization :: Article CreatorWhat Is Natural Immunity?
Your immune system defends your body against infections and illnesses. It makes proteins called antibodies that counteract or kill germs, like viruses and bacteria. You get protection, or "immunity," from a specific disease when your immune system makes an antibody for it.
Natural immunity happens after you get infected by a germ and your immune system responds by making antibodies to it. The infection could make you sick. But if you're exposed to that germ in the future, your body's defenses spot it and fight back with antibodies. This makes you less likely to get infected again.
Natural immunity to a disease can weaken over time, though. How quickly or slowly this happens depends on the disease.
For example, if someone gets natural immunity from a COVID-19 infection, the immunity may fade after 3 months. On the other hand, a child who gets measles is unlikely to ever catch it again.
Here's a look at the different types of immunity, including the differences between natural and vaccine-induced immunity, and how they compare against COVID-19.
Vaccines can protect your immune system against diseases without making you sick.
They safely boost your immunity by using an important protein from the virus or bacteria--just a piece of it so that it is unable to replicate in the host. Even though they can bring on side effects, they rarely make someone seriously ill.
Many vaccines can cause side effects like:
But side effects like these don't mean you're sick or that you got an infection.
Severe vaccine side effects are rare. In most cases, the benefits of getting vaccinated against a disease far outweigh the risks.
While it's true that natural active immunity can make you immune to a disease after just a single case of infection, there is a downside: You have to get sick. And many illnesses can cause serious health issues that can affect you, sometimes for life.
For example, in some people, chickenpox can cause lung infections (pneumonia), blood infections (sepsis), and swelling of the brain (encephalitis). Before a vaccine was developed, this common childhood illness resulted in 10,000 hospitalizations every year.
You can avoid risks like these by getting all the vaccines your doctor recommends.
Vaccine-induced immunity and natural immunity are both types of active immunity. That's the medical term for when you're exposed to something that spurs your immune system to make antibodies to a disease.
Depending on the disease, both naturally acquired natural immunity and the vaccine-induced type can last for a long time.
This is the other main type of immunity. Instead of your body making antibodies, you get passive immunity by receiving antibodies from another source.
This can happen in a couple of ways. A newborn gets passive immunity from their mother through the placenta, a structure in the womb that gives the baby oxygen and nutrients. You can also get passive immunity from treatments that have antibodies in them. You might need this type of treatment right away if a certain disease makes you sick. Doctors don't recommend it for routine use.
Passive immunity provides germ-fighting power right away, whereas it can take weeks for you to build up active immunity. But in general, passive immunity doesn't last as long.
It's when a contagious disease stops spreading easily because enough people in the community (or "herd") have become immune to it. This can be because of natural active immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, or passive immunity.
Vaccines aim to safely create herd immunity against infectious diseases by limiting the number of people who can spread the infection. But lots of people need to get vaccinated to help protect those who can't for medical or other reasons.
For example, before the vaccine for smallpox was available, the disease used to kill millions of a people each year. Today, mass vaccination has basically rid the world of smallpox.
Some people who haven't gotten vaccinated against COVID-19 worry about the safety of the vaccines and say they'd prefer to get natural immunity. But there are several dangers to doing that.
If you're not vaccinated, there's a much bigger chance that the virus could make you seriously sick or kill you. There's no way to know whether the disease will be mild or severe. You also risk spreading it to other people, including loved ones. What's more, you may be twice as likely to get re-infected by the virus, compared to someone caught COVID-19 while fully vaccinated.
If you catch COVID-19, research suggests that the natural immunity you get from it makes another COVID infection unlikely for 90 days. Experts aren't sure just how long that level of protection lasts, though. But even if you've had COVID, you can be infected again: A recent study showed that people who'd had it but weren't vaccinated were more than twice as likely to get it again, compared to vaccinated people who got a breakthrough case.
Getting fully vaccinated also gives you months of immunity -- without making you sick from the coronavirus. The vaccines are safe and effective. Even though they become less effective over time, they can still help protect you from getting severely ill from a breakthrough infection.
None of the updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccines is preferred over another and the CDC recommends the updated COVID-19 vaccines: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, or Novavax, to protect against serious illness from COVID-19.
The CDC also recommends everyone 6 months or older get an updated COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccination remains the best protection against COVID-19-related hospitalization and death. Vaccination also reduces your chance of suffering the effects of Long COVID, which can develop during or following acute infection and last for an extended duration.
Receiving an updated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine can restore and provide enhanced protection against the variants currently responsible for most infections and hospitalizations in the United States.
Whether you call it "hybrid" or "super" immunity, these terms mean the same thing. Your body's defenses may have gotten a short-term, "turbo-charged" boost if you caught COVID-19 and then got vaccinated. A small study also suggests you could get this type of boost from a breakthrough infection if you've already been vaccinated.
Lab research suggests that people with hybrid immunity make higher levels of virus-fighting antibodies than people who've been either vaccinated or infected. Their antibodies are also more potent than those in people who've only gotten their initial COVID-19 vaccines.
Don't try to catch COVID-19, even if you've been vaccinated. There's still a chance you could get sick and accidentally spread the virus to others. If you haven't gotten vaccinated, you're more likely to get severely ill, be hospitalized, or die from COVID-19.
Experts aren't sure how long hybrid immunity lasts compared to getting only vaccinated or infected. Early research suggests the protection drops over time.
With infectious COVID-19 variants like Omicron going around, it's important to get vaccinated and keep up to date with your booster shots once you're eligible for them.
7 Tips To Inoculate Your Career With Stress And Burnout Immunity
A few simple steps can inoculate you with immunity from job stress and risk of burnout.
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Ahead of graduation season, University of Pennsylvania stress expert, Dr. Kandi Wiens, has a warning for college grads on the job hunt: Beware the "churn and burn culture."
It is well documented that many companies overwork their employees. According to a 2024 Gitnux MarketData Report, 44% of U.S. Employees say they are overworked, and half of them say that large workloads add to their work-related stress. The New York Times reports two-decades of over 200 studies that found grueling work hours have diminishing returns in the form of serious health problems, injury on the job and lower productivity. Case in point. Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla, was accused of corporate slavery, treating employees like collateral damage when praising Tesla China workers for "burning the three-a.M. Oil."
Workweeks of 60, 80, even 100 hours are commonplace in major corporations, Wiens notes. MarketWatch, for example, reports that Elon Musk logs in as much as 120 hours a week, Google's Marissa Mayer clocks up to 130 weekly hours and Tim Cook at Apple sends emails at 4:30 a.M. Unfortunately, most of the science has focused on the burnout aftereffects of such brutal hours with far too little emphasis on burnout risk detection or burnout immunity before it becomes intractable.
How To Determine Your Burnout Risk Level
When overworking chains you to the desk, it can destroy your career, fracture your family ties and it can kill you. You can recover from stress with certain management techniques, but burnout results from cumulative and unmanaged stress, and once you contract it, there's no quick fix.
Overworked employees often think PTO or a vacation will remedy the condition, but that's a myth. You can't cure burnout by slowing down, taking a long vacation or working fewer hours.
The key symptom of burnout is exhaustion in the form of a deep fatigue that isn't curable by rest or time off. Your best recourse is burnout immunity through early detection of burnout risk, which allows you to take preemptive self-care action (shown here) before you hit the wall.
The World Health Organization classifies burnout as a medical diagnosis and defines it as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed." Burnout is diagnosed by three symptoms:
Feelings of energy depletion, exhaustion and fatigue Increased mental distance from your job, along with feelings of negativism or cynicism related to your job Reduced professional efficacy The first step to immunize yourself against burnout is to determine your risk level early on before it's intractable, according to Wiens, a specialist in emotional intelligence and author of Burnout Immunity: How Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Build Resilience and Heal Your Relationship with Work. She suggests asking yourself these questions: What's your current degree of workplace stress? Are you stressed-out, in danger of burning out, at high risk for burnout or already burned-out?
You can also take her Burnout Risk Quiz here to determine your risk. She advises that you learn what makes you vulnerable to burning out—not your boss, not your competitor, not your seemingly indefatigable coworker—and then take measures to protect yourself from the career killer that's been called "an equal-opportunity international crisis."
Triggers That Put You On The Fast Track To Burnout
Wiens points out that, when triggered, the logical brain—the area responsible for problem-solving, decision-making, and rational thinking—shuts down. Emotions take over, and we're flooded with adrenaline and cortisol—a state in which we can't see clearly or make sound decisions, and we stay in that mode until the trigger has dissipated.
"This is why it's vitally important that each of us becomes aware of our unique triggers," she advises. "Sometimes triggers are obvious, either because they're vivid and undeniable—your boss yells at you or someone makes a last-minute change to your schedule—or it's a trigger you've lived with for a long time. Other triggers are subtler and require more focused attention to identify; still others are entirely unknown to us."
It's possible to identify triggers by working backward from the result of the trigger, she points out, adding the trick is to pinpoint the events that trigger workplace stress.
What makes your stomach lurch? What is something you absolutely cannot tolerate? What's something your coworker or boss does that makes you want to scream? What makes you feel unfocused, like your brain is "offline?" What makes you feel out of control? What makes your self-confidence plummet? She recommends thinking back over the last few weeks and looking for any occasion that caused an immediate emotional or physical reaction—an abrupt change in your thinking or mental state or a sudden shift in behavior.
"Maybe you suddenly felt sad, irritable, frustrated, numb or overwhelmed," she says. "Or maybe you experienced nausea, muscle tension, shakiness or pain. Maybe you were overtaken by negativity or an impulse to withdraw. Perhaps you lashed out at someone, became passive- aggressive or cried. Any of these automatic reactions is an indication that you've been triggered. Once you identify your triggered state, work backward until you can pinpoint what set you off."
Burnout Immunity From Exploitative Organizations
Churn-and-burn cultures take advantage of competitive achievers who habitually overwork and overextend themselves, according to Wiens.
"Churn-and-burn cultures have characteristically low employee engagement metrics, high levels of absenteeism and turnover and high rates of burnout," she explains. "When word gets out that these organizations are burning people out left and right, leaders struggle to recruit and retain top talent, which reinforces the vicious cycle within the churn-and-burn culture. In churn-and-burn cultures, we often hear about leaders and employees who are highly cynical, resistant to change, quitting quietly and/or actively looking to leave their organization. These attitudes and behaviors perpetuate and sometimes even add fuel to the burnout fire."
According to MarketWatch, the average worker puts in four hours of unpaid overtime a week and spends another four hours just thinking about work. A large body of research reports mounting employee burnout, plus data showing that 41% of employed Americans currently experience post-time-off burnout and 14% making mistakes due to exhaustion.
Although Wiens recognizes that new grads are eager and ready to get to work, she cautions them.
"Too many organizations exploit high achievers and prey on their enthusiasm. While it's tempting to accept a job offer, especially from a reputable employer, it's important to protect your mental health at the start of your career."
Wiens has found that people with burnout immunity are able to use emotional intelligence skills to regulate and stay in control of their emotions, even in the midst of high-stress situations. "The power to determine your best response to stress is in your control, and it depends on nothing more than how you choose to view your ability to manage it," she insists.
How To Inoculate Yourself From Stress And Burnout
Wiens argues that the further you stray from you, the greater your vulnerability to burnout. The risk of burning out rises in direct proportion to the degree that your work culture is out of alignment with the conditions you need to thrive and perform your best. She offers seven tips that provide burnout immunity:
Make sure you choose a work environment that aligns with your temperament and personality, making you less vulnerable to burnout. If you're becoming a casualty of a churn-and-burn culture, remind yourself that it's not you, it's your job burning you out. No amount of perfectionism or overwork on your part is going to change the culture in a positive direction. Look closely at the cultural and environmental conditions causing you to feel depleted, cynical and exhausted instead of blaming yourself for not being able to keep up with the culture. Find ways to create some physical and mental space from your job—such as a vacation or sabbatical—so you can regain your perspective and reconnect with what's really most important to you. Consider recognizing and be willing to accept short term sacrifices to achieve your longer-term goals if staying with the organization is your best option. Learn to shift from a threat response to a challenge response, even if you've lived with an overactive amygdala your whole life. With this mindset, you view your stress as a helpful resource, rather than a harmful threat. Don't become a part of the problem that's contributing to the churn-and-burn cultural conditions. Ask yourself, "What am I doing in response to my experience here? And what is my response doing to me, and to others?" Vaccines News
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