Toxins Inhibit Immune System Function
The toxic effects of some metals, such as lead and arsenic, have been recognized for hundreds of years. There has been continuing medical and political concern over the increasing contamination of the environment by heavy metals. Because lead or other metals are so widely utilized in everyday life, they have the potential to pose a continuous risk for human and animal health.
Heavy metals seem to interact with the immune system in antigen non-specific fashion. In most cases, the heavy metals compete with “good” metals in the function of metalloproteins and metalloenzymes. The good metals are essential to health because nature integrated them into human biochemistry—the size and charge of the essential metals integrate with the peptides, proteins and enzymes they are components of, allowing the biomolecules to fold properly and take on the form (3-dimensional structure) and function necessary to support life.
Heavy metals are smaller, higher charged ions that insert into these precisely folded peptides, proteins and enzymes, displace the essential metals and, simply because they are the wrong size and charge, change the 3-dimensional structure of the biomolecule, which alters both form and function. In doing so, the activity of those compounds are altered, decreased or completely inhibited.
These metals exert direct toxicity to compounds of the immune system, which can either lead to malfunctioning of the system as a whole or to the disruption of the regulatory systems, which may give rise to exaggerated responses. The interaction of heavy metals with the immune system, which may lead to immunosuppression or immunodysregulation, may have consequences of allergy or autoimmunity, whereas autoimmunity or allergy induced by heavy metals may often result in the malfunctioning immune system.
Additionally, these heavy metal-containing compounds may also become targets of the immune response, in essence telling the B cells to create antibodies against natural compounds. These are called “autoantibodies” and can lead to autoimmune diseases like Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA).
