Although primarily aimed at the acute defence against infection and tissue damage, a growing body of evidence implicates innate immunity in several chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes [33] in which raised glucose concentrations, the hallmark of that disease, induce overexpression of Toll-like receptor(TLR) [34, 35] and CD14 [36], promote de-novo local synthesis of RAS components [37, 38] and potentiate a wide array of ATII-mediated biological actions e.g. [39–41]. Here, CD14 is linked to infection.