The Little Girl Who Fell Down

Immunology for Kids

Featuring ShaSha as "The Little Girl"

One happy sunny afternoon, Shasha was playing with her pretty pink balloons in the garden. Suddenly, she tripped over a tiny rock and fell onto the dirty ground.

Shasha cried, "BOO HOO HOO!"

She stood back up and realised she had a tiny cut on her right knee and it was bleeding. Not only was there blood on her knee, there was also dirt from the ground. As you can see in the circle in the picture above, the cut on her knee, causes her skin(epithelial barrier) to be broken and this allows the bad and ugly bacteria to enter her wound and enter Shasha's body.We don't want bacteria to enter Shasha's body because bad and ugly bacteria will cause Shasha to fall sick and feel unhappy.

So what does the body do to prevent Shasha from falling sick?

In Shasha's body and also all of our bodies, we have a special "army of cells" in our immune system that helps us fight bad and ugly bacteria so that we will not fall sick. As you can see in the above picture, Shasha's broken skin is shown. Since bad and ugly bacteria is found everywhere, when Shasha fell, some of the bad and ugly bacteria, which we cannot see with our naked eyes, got stucked onto her wound. Remember I mentioned that out body has a special "army of cells" which fights and kills the bad and ugly bacteria? Yes! The purple round happy cells are called leukocytes which consists of lymphocytes and monocytes and they are the good guys in our body! They will defend our body by killing the baddies!

Even though our body has the necessary mechanisms to fight the "baddies" which are the bad and ugly bacteria and microbes that can cause infections and also cause you and Shasha to fall sick, it is also important for Shasha and the rest of us to clean the wound and apply proper dressing. This is so that we kill the bad guys before they even have the chance to enter our body.That is why Mom cleaned Shasha's wound and put on a pretty plaster on her wound. Shasha then continued to play in the garden with a smile on her face.

And so the day is saved by Mom and the good guys in our immune system!

THE END