What do T-Cells and B-Cells do? What happens to their function if you have HIV? Why?

Question

What do T-Cells and B-Cells do? What happens to their function if you have HIV? Why?

Answer 1

B cells are made in the bone marrow, they are basically inert cells with alternately spliced DNA which try to find foreign substances in the human blood, not cells. They are randomly made, up to 1 million different B cells can be made per cycle, and most of them die because they never end up detecting anything. However, if one detects, say a bacteria in the blood, they mark them as harmful and tell an organelle (forgot which one) to kill that marked substance. When a bacteria is detected, many more of the same kind of B cell that identified the target are produced because they think it's a big infection, so they try to kill every possible foreign material present. They also form memory B cells for that particular attack just in case it happens again, the response could be fast and easy. The reason they do this is because they have a super short life span, they are continually recycled, but memory B cells can stick around for a while

T cells are like  B cells, but they go around and check cells for abnormalities by a "secret handshake", like a lock and key type mechanism. If everything checks out, they move on. If they find an error, they mark that cell, and a killer T cell comes and destroys that particular cell. In HIV, what happens upon infection is that actually, most of the virus is destroyed while it's in the blood by B cells, but some of it is able to infect T cells, very little amount. That's why the gestation period occurs, almost no virus is found, which assumes the attack is over. However, HIV begins spreading by infecting T cells, which makes the body overcreate even more T cells, which is why you have the initial T cell spike. That's how they diagnose that you have HIV. Overtime, the T cells just start dying because the virus reproduces like crazy, you lose your immune system, and what's interesting is that you don't actually ever die from HIV, but you die from other diseases infecting you and staying in your body because of the lack of T cells to control it.

Hope this helps!