edsonrao

I agree. The article doesn´t say anything about its effectivenes against dengue. As he said, it is something widely used in cases of dengue, maybe we will have something published in the recent years about the connection between the herb and dengue clinical signs.

A very basic explanation could be: Dendritic cells (DC), as other APCs (antigen presenting cell), are specialized in presenting antigens, what promptly brings to our mind the class II MHC context. Apart from this, like all other nucleated cell, they also can be infected by pathogens and present their epitopes in a class I MHC context. What make these cells so cool, is that they are usually located in strategic points of our body in a way to be the first ones to fight a pathogen. A DC can be killed by a citotoxic TCD8 cell, but it's more probable that a DC, that has seen a pathogen, encounter a TCD4 (is more often in our blood stream). At this point the DC will present epitopes of the pathogen to the limphocyte TCD4 via class II MHC context leading to diferentiation of this naive T cell into a helper T cell making a bridge with the adaptive immunity. The B cell is able to take up a full virus particle, process and produce antibodies against its parts, but the "cream de la cream" of the humoral response happens when a T helper CD4 cell encounter a B cell presenting viral epitopes via MHCII that is recognized by the T cell. A couple of other co-stimulation is needed as CD40-CD40L and then the B cell is iduced to diferentiate in plasma cells when they will secret a great amount of antibody with high avidity to that epitope. Hope it could have helped. Regards.

Basically, dengue is transmitted by mosquitoes of genus Aedes and Malaria by Phlebotomines. They function only as vectors not being greatly affected by the virus (in case of dengue) or parasite (in case of malaria). The big question that goes around dengue is how our body responds to infection. Up till now, we know that the immune response elicited by the virus is very peculiar and is not only related with the clearance of viruses but also with the desease itself (as in many other disorders). How many times we've heard of citotoxic TCD4 cells or that in a second viral infection you have more chances to develop worse clinics? Immune response to dengue disease kind of creates a new issue on immunology and we will need to elucidade a lot of it before being gifted with a secure vaccine against it.