Researchers Investigating Self-Boosting Vaccines 218
An anonymous reader writes "Vaccines, contrary to opinions from the anti-science crowd, are some of the most effective tools in modern medicine. For some diseases, a single shot is all it takes for lifetime immunity. Others, though, require booster shots, to remind your immune system exactly what it should prepare to fight. Failure to get these shots threatens an individual's health, and the herd immunity concept as well. Scientists are now looking into 'self-boosting' vaccines in order to fix that problem. Some viruses are capable of remaining in the body for a person's entire lifetime. If researchers can figure out a way to safely harness these, it may be possible to add genes that would create proteins to train the immune system against not just one, but multiple other viruses (abstract). This is a difficult problem to solve; changing the way we do vaccinations will itself have consequences for herd immunity. It also hinges on finding a virus that can survive the immune system without having uncomfortable flare-ups from time to time."
This gets old... (Score:5, Interesting)
"contrary to opinions from the anti-science crowd..."
What is the point of this statement? I mean seriously, what's the point? I've been reading this site for years and it just seems to be getting more and more like this—which is not a good thing.
Who cares what the "anti-science" crowd thinks? Why even bother mentioning them? Why acknowledge their existence, particularly when NOT responding to one directly?
Just report the fucking story. What some other childishly labeled crowd thinks about it is irrelevant. I can't even get through a remotely interesting story about geology without some asshole making a "the earth is only 6000-years-old" joke. Who... fucking... cares? It's not. We know. We get it. The joke is old and tiresome. I really wish I was coming here to read interesting discussions about the science at hand. Instead, I'm constantly deluged with this kind of childish bullshit.