Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University found that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol could bolster the immune system and help it fight infection.

The research, published earlier this week in the journal Vaccine, could be instrumental in helping scientists find new ways to improve the human body's ability to respond to vaccines," according to a press release.

"If you have a family history of alcohol abuse, or are at risk, or have been an abuser in the past, we are not recommending you go out and drink to improve your immune system," Ilhem Messaoudi, the lead author of the paper, said in a statement. "But for the average person who has, say, a glass of wine with dinner, it does seem in general to improve health and cardiovascular function. And now we can add the immune system to that list."

Researchers used 12 rhesus macaques - a monkey species that have an immune system very similar to humans - to conduct a study. They trained the group to consume a 4 percent ethanol mixture of alcohol on their own accord and then examined their responses to the smallpox vaccine.

As part of the study, researchers vaccinated the monkeys against small pox and then separated the animals into two groups. One group had access to the 4 percent ethanol and the other group had access to sugar water.

Researchers said all of the animals had regular access to pure water and food.

Then, for 14 months, the researchers monitored the monkey's daily ethanol consumption. And the animals were vaccinated again, seven months after the experiment began.

"Like humans, rhesus macaques showed highly variable drinking behavior," Messaoudi, a former assistant professor at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at OHSU and assistant scientist in the Division of Pathobiology and Immunology at the Oregon National Primate Research Center, said. "Some animals drank large volumes of ethanol, while others drank in moderation."

The monkey group that had access to ethanol was then segregated into two groups. One ethanol group consisted of heavy drinkers or those that had an average blood ethanol concentration greater than 0.08 percent - the legal limit for humans to be able to drive a vehicle. The other group was made up of moderate drinkers with an average blood ethanol concentration of 0.02 to 0.04 percent.

Prior to consuming the alcohol, all of the animals showed comparable responses to the small pox vaccination. But after exposure to the alcohol, the two groups of monkeys responded in very different ways to the vaccination.

Researchers found that the heavy drinking monkeys showed greatly diminished vaccine responses compared with the control group of monkeys who drank the sugar water.

But the more surprising finding: the moderate-drinking monkeys displayed enhanced responses to the vaccine compared to the control group. Moderate drinking bolstered their bodies' immune systems.

"It seems that some of the benefits that we know of from moderate drinking might be related in some way to our immune system being boosted by that alcohol consumption," Kathy Grant, professor of behavioral neuroscience at OHSU and a senior scientist at the ONPRC, said in a statement.

The researchers stressed that excessive alcohol consumption was injurious to the monkeys' immune systems --as excessive alcohol consumption is bad for human bodies in many ways.