The 8th Meeting of the Alcohol and Immunology Research Interest Group (AIRIG) was held at Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, Illinois, USA, on November 21, 2003. Reports from multiple laboratories reveal that the functional integrity of the immune system is of paramount importance to the survival of the individual after infection or injury. Evidence supports the idea that exposure to alcohol causes dysregulation of both the innate and the adaptive arms of the immune system. Gaining a better understanding of how alcohol interferes with normal inflammatory and immunoregulatory processes will aid researchers in the design of therapeutic interventions that can be used to improve these responses to better fight infection and maintain the health of the individual. At this meeting, nine speakers presented a summary of their recent work on the combined effects of ethanol and injury, infection, or inflammatory challenge. Topics were (1) T-cell activation after chronic ethanol ingestion in mice, (2) effect of ethanol consumption on the severity of acute viral-mediated pancreatitis, (3) ethanol and alveolar macrophage dysfunction, (4) impaired intestinal immunity and barrier function: a cause for enhanced bacterial translocation in alcohol intoxication and burn injury, (5) immune consequences of the combined insult of acute ethanol exposure and burn injury, (6) consequences of alcohol-induced dysregulation of immediate hemodynamic and inflammatory responses to trauma/hemorrhage, (7) regulation of tumor necrosis factor-alpha production by Kupffer cells after chronic exposure to ethanol, (8) acute exposure to ethanol and suppression of cytokine responses induced through Toll-like receptors, and (9) inhibition of antigen-presenting cell functions by alcohol: implications for hepatitis C virus infection. We anticipate that the work presented at the 8th Meeting of AIRIG, summarized in this article, and presented in the nine articles to follow in this Special Issue of Alcohol will stimulate ideas that will develop into research projects in these topical areas.