Another group of diseases that can be tested for in the lab is immunodeficiencies. We generally think of immunodeficiencies as congenital diseases like Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease (SCID), in which the patient has no B Cells or T Cells due to a defect in the RAG gene. However, primary or congenital immunodeficiencies are relatively rare; testing will be described in the next section.
Many pathogens have tricky "evasion" mechanisms that prevent a normal immune response, such as secreting certain cytokine-like chemicals, hiding in a cell, or other ways. The most common and devastating of these tricks is caused by the HIV virus, which causes the acquired immunodeficiency called AIDS. This is due to the fact that the virus chooses to live in our CD4 T Cells. They slowly become depleted, not just because of the virus's activities but because our CD8 Cytotoxic T cells recognize them as infected cells and destroy them.
