Autoimmunity

Autoimmunity is the system of immune responses of an organism against its own cells and tissues. Any disease that results from such an aberrant immune response is termed an autoimmune disease. Prominent examples include Celiac disease, diabetes mellitus type 1, Sarcoidosis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), Sjögren's syndrome, Churg-Strauss Syndrome, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, Graves' disease, idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, Addison's Disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), ankylosing spondylitis, Polymyositis (PM), and Dermatomyositis (DM). Autoimmune diseases are very often treated with steroids.

The misconception that an individual's immune system is totally incapable of recognizing self antigens is not new. Paul Ehrlich, at the beginning of the twentieth century, proposed the concept of horror autotoxicus, wherein a "normal" body does not mount an immune response against its own tissues. Thus, any autoimmune response was perceived to be abnormal and postulated to be connected with human disease. Now, it is accepted that autoimmune responses are an integral part of vertebrate immune systems (sometimes termed "natural autoimmunity"), normally prevented from causing disease by the phenomenon of immunological tolerance to self-antigens. Autoimmunity should not be confused with alloimmunity.

Autoimmune (album)

Autoimmune is an album by Meat Beat Manifesto. Originally announced as a twenty track 2xCD release, Dangers decided to shorten the album to a single disc with different track listings between the US and European releases. Stylistically, it steps up the pace from other recent Meat Beat Manifesto albums, using elements of dub, hip-hop, industrial, breakbeat and more, and this saw the album being billed as a partial return to the early industrial sound of the band in the late 1980s. The album has also been described as Jack Dangers' take on dubstep, though Dangers has stated that Meat Beat Manifesto has always utilized the underlying concepts of that particular genre. This is the first Meat Beat Manifesto album with Danger's vocals since Actual Sounds + Voices in 1998; he appears on the track "Solid Waste". The album cover continues the checker-board/grid theme also seen on earlier Meat Beat Manifesto albums Actual Sounds + Voices, RUOK?, and the Off-Centre EP. Most of the remaining songs that were excised from the original double-disc concept were later released on an EP available only on the Autoimmune tour.