Patient Zero Lab Report Dashell Zamm The Immune system is one of the most important parts of the human body. Its role is to protect us from outside dangers such as pathogens and disease and to keep the body healthy. The immune system protects the body from disease by having a complex system of organs and cells to keep the body safe.
The first barrier of the immune system and of the body is the skin which keeps out pathogens from entering the body, but if there is a cut in the body, the skin can no longer defend against the pathogen, so next comes inflammation which helps to limit the pread of the disease by causing swelling and a large amount of white blood cells to go to the injured parts of the body. Another really important aspect of the immune system is the lymph nodes, which release lymphocytes into the infected part of the body, and lymphocytes are white blood cells that kill of disease.
When the immune system responds to certain pathogens, it realises antibodies, which are proteins used to help kill off the pathogen. So doctors today actually use this knowledge to help find more hidden pathogens and diseases. They use a certain ind of testing called ELISA testing, which pretty much is the doctor takes a sample from a person, and in that sample they do a series of test to conduct to see if the person has a certain pathogen. So they are actually using the immune system’s natural response to try to see if the pathogen is inside the human body.
Diseases are spread many different ways all throughout the world. The ways they are transmitted are, blood-borne, air- borne, water-borne, contact, sexual contact, vector, and, food- borne. With all these different and very common types of iseases being transmitted to people all around the world, it is very important to make sure people go to check ups with their doctors frequently, and if you think you have some of the symptoms of the disease, to get tested to see if you have it, so it doesn’t spread to even more people.
With all diseases there is always a patient zero, which means the first person who had the disease. It is important to know who this patient zero is, so you are able to track how many people have been in contact with people and from there how many of those secondary people ho made contact with patient zero have been in contact with anyone else. So it ends up making a sort of tree graph of all the people who have or could have the disease.
The materials we used to conduct the lab we did are: Yellow tubes, violet tubes (+), blue tubes (-), green tubes (PA), orange tubes (SA), brown tubes (SUB), 12-well microplate strips, 50 microliter fixed volume micropipette, yellow tips, disposable plastic transfer pipettes, 70 to 80 ml wash buffer in beaker, large stack of paper towels, and black marking pen. In this lab we used a ELISA test to find out who was infected with the disease. The word ELISA stands for Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay.
The ELISA test, uses samples from the human body, such as blood samples, and they put that sample in a plastic dish and the antigens for that disease stick to the plastic dish. From there they add antibodies for the certain disease they are trying to testfor, into the dish with the antigens stuck to the plastic, and if the antigen matches the antibody added that means the sample turns up positive for the disease which means the person the sample is taken from has the disease.
There are two different types of antibodies, primary nd secondary. The primary antibody is used to bind of the antigen, and the secondary antibody is an antibody from a different species, and what is does is allow the reaction to find the result for the test to happen, by the color changing. So the secondary antibody binds to the enzyme substrate added to the dish, to get the results of the blue color by the combination of the enzyme substrate and the secondary antibody.
In this lab we used both positive and negative controls, to see if the ELISA test was working properly, by having the positive and negative ontrols, you should get a guaranteed result of the negative control not turning blue and the positive control turning blue, and if they both turn blue you know your test did not work properly and that you should, conduct it again. Here are the table of the results from the class of who ended up positive with the disease and who ended up negative with the disease: In the lab, at the end, we never found out who was patient zero because the results weren’t clear enough.
If the samples did not contain the antigen then the primary and secondary antigen would not react and bind to the antigen nd the enzyme substrate, and then there would be no change in color of the sample. If the samples did contain the antigen then the primary and secondary antigen would react and bind to the antigen and the enzyme substrate, therefore resulting in a blue color change. It is important to wash out the wells after every step, to keep the experiment all the same, and to make sure there is no unwanted substances inside the wells, that would interfere with the experiment.
When we added the primary antibody to the well, and it contained the antigen, then the primary antibody would bind to the antigen, and if the ample did not contain the antigen, then the primary antibody could not bind to the antigen. But in both these situations, there would be no color changing reaction, because the secondary antibody was added and couldn’t bind to the enzyme substrate, which causes the blue color changing reaction if its positive, and no reaction if its negative.
If the sample shows a negative result this does not always mean you no not have the disease. This could always be because the experiment wasn’t done properly and there was an error somewhere along the process which aused the result to appear negative, or that the sample taken did not contain any of the disease or the antigens, and it could still be some of the disease somewhere in the body.
You could avoid getting not accurate results by doing at least three of each sample, and that’s what we did in this experiment, we used three of every positive and negative controls, and 3 of each sample from each person. What does is that if one goes wrong or turns out incorrect you still have 2 other samples for reference, and if you for some reason dont have the antigen in ne of the samples, you still have the 2 other that could have it. It’s just overall better to conduct a more accurate experiment.
These types of tests are not too uncommon, you can even buy some at your local pharmisease, such as a pregnancy test, which uses the same type of testing. In the transmition of diseases, you dont alwqays have to have direct exposure to patient zero at all, you could have exposure to the third or second person who had exposure to patient zero, so it is very easy to contract the disease from someone who had contact with someone else ho had contact with patient zero.
In conclusion, this lab demonstrates a very very small scale version of how disease is spread and transmitted although the world. It shows how scarily easy it is to contract a disease, because you never really know who has it, and it shows it is really helpful to keep track of who has it and how many people they have been in contact with. It is always a great thing to stay safe and always stay sanitary, so you don’t contact something you really don’t want to have, and to thank and appreciate your immune system to keep you healthy and safe.