It's been a while since "Human Infectious Diseases"; but my understanding is that the inflammatory response is a component of the 'Innate immune system', a very, very, old, comparatively rudimentary; but fast-responding complement to the more recent immune system with pathogen-specific antibodies and killer T cells and things.
The inflammation itself is partially a cause of the changes that tissues undergo to do damage control and partially serves to increase supply of particular chemicals and cell types [wikipedia.org] at the site of the issue(leading to the redness and swelling that are most obvious.
As for it being associated with a laundry list of unpleasant diseases, I'm told that it's a combination of:
1. Inflammation is (when it's working correctly) a stress response/damage control mechanism, that kicks in in response to certain environmental stresses and pathogens, so people who are inflamed a lot are also unpleasantly likely to be people who are being exposed to something that isn't doing them any good.
2. Like scarring, inflammation is one of those 'unpleasant; but it beat dying for most of evolutionary history' arrangements that wreaks a lot of havoc in the process of saving you from infection or tissue damage; which was a much better trade-off before we had access to modern medicine to deal with our acute illnesses and injuries; but also wanted to live to be 90.
3. The immune system, innate and acquired, is sort of your own personal military-industrial complex, and has a nasty tendency to sometimes go off the rails and start killing civilians in an increasingly paranoid response to minimal or nonexistent security threats, giving us autoimmune disorders.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/J1A1miDoKoc/story01.htm
Jesuits percy harvin percy harvin mike wallace mike wallace Paul Bearer Valerie Harper
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