Silent celebration

In the silent celebration humans become infected with a pathogen, but do not notice the infection because of the asymptomatic course. There is a silent and subclinical infection. As a result of this infection, it is immunized against the specific pathogen and will no longer fall ill with the pathogen group in the future.

What is the silent celebration?

In the clinical setting, the term "silent" is mostly used when there are no symptoms in connection with illnesses. The clinical symptoms of asymptomatic clinical pictures are therefore silent symptoms. The silent celebration relates to the immune system.

When unvaccinated, healthy children with a strong immune system come into contact with certain pathogens, the process of silent celebration takes place in the sense of developing immunity. The unvaccinated child experiences a so-called silent infection with this phenomenon. The infection does not lead to the outbreak of the disease, but is asymptomatic and results in immunity against the pathogen.

Silent infections are either persistent or subclinical. In the subclinical form, the immune system prevents the outbreak of the disease. In the persistent form, the pathogen survives in the host, but does not reproduce the pathogen. This variant can lead to clinical signs of illness later, for example in stressful situations.

Function & task

Immunology has recognized that an organism can develop an immunity against the causative agents of infectious diseases after silent or asymptomatic infections. The respective pathogen is completely killed in the body by means of the immune system, without the person concerned having been immunized against the pathogen type in the past. After the infection has taken place, no signs of illness can be observed in the affected person. The silent celebration works similarly to a vaccination and means that the person affected is protected from renewed infections with the respective pathogen. After a silent celebration, the person affected can no longer contract diseases of the respective pathogen type, since antibodies from direct confrontation with the pathogen remain in their immune system.

In most cases, the person concerned will not notice the unsigned immunization. In some cases, however, those affected report a general feeling of exhaustion or a feeling of tiredness. However, these symptoms are usually not associated with disease severity.

According to previous observations, people can only celebrate quietly if they have a strong immune system and are dealing with an infection whose pathogen has already adapted strongly to human reservoir hosts. Only with adapted pathogens should a healthy immune system be able to combat pathogens unknown to it to a sufficient degree and thus protect people from later infections with the same pathogen.

The basis for the silent celebration is the adaptive power of the immune system. In addition to an innate and unspecific immune system, every person has a specific, adaptive immune system, which is also known as immunological memory. The immune system's ability to adapt to new pathogens is provided by the ability to recognize antigens as specific structures and to form molecularly targeted antibodies against the specific attacker. The antibodies that remain after an infection are specific antibodies and correspond to memory cells which, in the event of repeated contact with the pathogen, implement appropriate defense reactions in the shortest possible time.

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Illnesses & ailments

So far, silent festivities have mainly been observed with the pathogens of diseases such as mumps. The subclinical form is the variant of the silent celebration described above. Not all people experience silent celebrations but permanently subclinically. Some people do not experience symptoms, but the pathogens remain in their bodies and are not completely eradicated by their immune system. In this context persistent infection is referred to as a subgroup of silent festivities.

The pathogen in question survives within the host for a more or less unlimited period of time. For reasons that are not known in detail, however, it produces few or no productive pathogens. Therefore, this type of infection remains asymptomatic for the time being. However, if stress, poor nutrition and insomnia are added, or the immune system is impaired in other ways, clinical symptoms of infection sometimes appear after months or years in persistent forms of silent feiung.

Medicine knows several sub-variants of persistent infection. The term tolerated infection describes, for example, an infection acquired intrauterine, the pathogen of which reproduces normally, but is regularly excreted from the organism.

Latent infection forms the second subgroup. In this form, the pathogens and the immune system keep each other in balance for a long time. After some time, one of the two sides wins the upper hand and the disease either breaks out with clinical symptoms or the immune system succeeds in completely killing the pathogens.

A final form of silent persistent infection is masked infection. With this type of infection, the disease is neither indirectly nor directly detectable. While silent, subclinical infections lead to silent festivities, this does not have to be the case for persistent silent infections. The silent celebration only occurs when the immune system gains the upper hand and antibodies remain from the fight that can remember the specific pathogen of the infectious disease.