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Enlarge Image Early exposure. The Shuar people of the Amazon do not suffer from a chronic inflammatory response. Credit: Courtesy of the Shuar Health and Life History Project From an early age, the indigenous Shuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon are exposed to an army of parasites, viruses, and other microbes. But if children survive to adulthood—no guarantee, given that they're three times more likely to die before the age of 5 than children in the United States and Canada—they seem to end up with more efficient immune systems than people living in industrialized nations. That's the conclusion of...

Activating the right immune cells in infants could lead to new vaccineBoston, Mass. - In a paper that suggests a new strategy to prevent asthma, scientists at Children's Hospital Boston and their colleagues report that the influenza virus infection in young mice protected the mice as adults against the development of allergic asthma. The same protective effect was achieved by treating young mice with compound isolated from the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), a bacterium that colonizes the stomach and is best known for causing ulcers and increasing the risk of gastric cancers. The findings, published online December 13 in...