Scientists Move Closer To a Universal Flu Vaccine 205
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Vaccines for most diseases typically work for years or decades but with the flu, next fall it will be time to get another dose. Now Carl Zimmer writes that a flurry of recent studies on the virus has brought some hope for a change as flu experts foresee a time when seasonal flu shots are a thing of the past, replaced by long-lasting vaccines. 'That's the goal: two shots when you're young, and then boosters later in life' says Dr. Gary Nabel, predicting that scientists would reach that goal before long: 'in our lifetime, for sure, unless you're 90 years old.' Today's flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance but a traditional flu vaccine can protect against only flu viruses with a matching hemagglutinin protein. If a virus evolves a different shape, the antibodies cannot latch on, and it escapes destruction. Scientists have long wondered whether they could escape this evolutionary cycle with a universal flu vaccine that would to attack a part of the virus that changes little from year to year so now researchers are focusing on target antigens which are highly conserved between different influenza A virus subtypes. 'Universal vaccination with universal vaccines would put an end to the threat of global disaster that pandemic influenza can cause,' says Dr. Sara Gilbert."
When will this be available? (Score:3, Funny)
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Re:When will this be available? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah; but MMR was all part of the Big Pharma/reptoid autism conspiracy, so they were willing to accept lower margins on that one...
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You missed the joke.
The GP was agreeing with you.
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Re:When will this be available? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now cancer? There is a disease i doubt they'll ever find a cure for, because if it did it would cost them billions.
Which cancer are you talking about? There are many different diseases which come under the heading of "cancer", several of which have cures available today.
Re:When will this be available? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nationalize (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why they should have nothing to do with it. It should be solely the job of public sector professionals (being PUBLIC HEALTH and all), working on nothing else - say boner pills - but vaccine production and research; all well-funded and isolated from horseshit from any part of the political spectrum.
Some things are far more important that filthy lucre, air-headed 'stars', and pissing contests: preventing pandemics should be chief among them, FFS.
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It hasn't stopped all the other vaccines.
Plus, it's great short-term strategy, and companies like short-term strategy, right? If you're the one that makes the universal flu vaccine, then people are going to buy from you and not your competitors. Never mind that you can charge a lot more (since it's much more useful) and that insurance is almost sure to pay for it.
Re:When will this be available? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Look at what the pharma industry did with smallpox, polio and rinderpest. They spent millions of dollars and decades of research to come up with something which would permanently take care of these issues and look at the money which is flowing into them now that they've done so.
Just think how much more they could have made had they come up with something that needs to be administered year after year. The amounts would be staggering.
These pharma folks must be idiots to come up with a vaccine that prevents something once and for all rather than just doling out temporary fixes.
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In a free market, its competition... If your competitor comes up with a one-time vaccine, even if it cost 10x as much, it would render the "one-a-year" guys obsolete overnight.
Of course when collusion is involved, they would just make a gentleman's agreement to not research a one-time vaccine, or keep it behind closed doors until such time as someone outside the agreement figures it out, then magically bring it to market.
You first (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You first (Score:5, Funny)
Fine, I'll take it any time. Not only do I hate getting the flu, when the deadly avian flu desaster strikes some day, I'd finally like to put all the doomsday scenario survival skills I've practised in video games for years to a test. :-)
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You probably won't get the chance.
There's probably a VERY good reason these conserved regions are not attacked by antibodies, even though it would be evolutionarily beneficial to do so. About the only good reasons are
(1) the way antibodies work, it is impossible (if that were the case, this article wouldn't be here for a few more decades - until we have better gene therapy and could change what antibodies can do)
(2) targeting that site would lead to false positives on things that are more beneficial than th
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3) antibodies once constructed would work fine, but the antibody forming process chooses the fast-changing parts of the surface coat for some reason.
In addition, assuming the vaccine works flawlessly, and you wipe out flu in humans, it will cross over again from the animal population.
So, we not only have to wipe out flu in humans, but (at least) domestic animals, where a large reservoir exists.
And then it's going to cross back into the domestic animals from wild infected animals.
If, as is likely, you get la
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Evolution isn't about best, just good enough. Best won't ever take over unless it gives an overall advantage, which usually m
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Fine, I'll take it any time. Not only do I hate getting the flu, when the deadly avian flu desaster strikes some day, I'd finally like to put all the doomsday scenario survival skills I've practised in video games for years to a test. :-)
You probably won't get the chance.
There's probably a VERY good reason these conserved regions are not attacked by antibodies, even though it would be evolutionarily beneficial to do so. About the only good reasons are
(1) the way antibodies work, it is impossible (if that were the case, this article wouldn't be here for a few more decades - until we have better gene therapy and could change what antibodies can do) (2) targeting that site would lead to false positives on things that are more beneficial than the flu is harmful.
Plus, some studies have found that getting the regular flu shot has made it more likely you will catch the swine flu [cbslocal.com]. So if you are happy being an experimental Guinea pig, then that is fine by me.
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I will not be on bleeding edge of this.
That's wise. I was on the bleeding edge of flu shots themselves, back in the early seventies. It wasn't voluntary, I was in the Air Force then. The vaccine gave me the worst case of flu I've ever had, before or since. Needless to say, that was my very first and very last flu shot.
Oral/Nasal Vaccines (Score:2)
The last I heard, this particular universal vaccine does not work very well when injected. The key is to introduce the antigen(s) below the tongue: [sciencedaily.com]
The normal flu vaccines are also available as a nasal aerosol. [flumist.com]
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It actually can, if the manufacturer screws up. That's why many EU countries stopped two flu vaccines manufactured by Novartis (some stopped all three). There is also the BCG screwup in 1930 with 72 infants dead. Some vaccines are somewhat dangerous (yellow fever, rotavirus, rabies). And I write that as someone who has got most of the shots you need in Europe (MMR, polio, diphteria, tetanus, hepatitis A+B, TBE, BCG, flu).
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well yeah, shoddy standards can screw up anything
but generally, that's from cut rate manufacturers, three or four manufacturing cycles down the line, when oversight lags
up front, manufacturing standards will be spectacular
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How can a vaccine hurt you?
By giving you the symptoms of the disease, or containing something you're allergic to.
Extrapolation (Score:4, Funny)
So if a one season shot makes your shoulder sore for four or five days, this will....?
Re:Extrapolation (Score:4, Informative)
Probably make your arm sore for four or five days? It's not like they're going to be any bigger, it's just changing the composition of the payload.
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Your anecdotal experience is not relevant.
Not getting flu vaccine is an entry for the Darwin award.
You really should trust science.
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Statics don't work at the individual level.
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"Statics (sic) don't work at the individual level."
(I think you meant "statistics". If not, I have no idea what you are talking about and please ignore the response below.)
I think this is the problem. People trust their own anecdotal experience more than the scientific method. Doctors have a big problem with this when they will ignore practice guidelines based on broad scientific consensus and override it because their own anecdotal experience differs. This is a big fail.
Statistics do work at the individ
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It's a bit of a blanket statement. It should be more like "Not getting flu vaccine is an entry for the Darwin award, assuming you don't have any know potential side effects."
I didn't word it the best, but you get the idea.
I myself am torn on getting a shot only because I don't have children or am around the young/old to whom I could pass it. I
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But people love to quote anecdotal evidence, especially during the crazy election cycle. It is very famous "grandma eats dog food" or "child dies because ________" or whatever. It is common scare tactic among various constituency groups. Policies are often written with exceptions in mind, which tend to make horrible and convoluted laws.
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Hardly - unless you're a member of an extremely at-risk population the flu is unlikely to be more than an inconvenience, hardly Darwin-award worthy. Moreover, due to the extreme volatility of the influenza virus and the long lead-time necessary for vaccine production and distribution it's largely a shot in the dark as to whether the vaccine will actually do any good against the strain that actually spreads this year. Meanwhile by going to a hospital/doctors office/etc to get vaccinated you're voluntarily
Ah, color me shocked... (Score:2, Informative)
(From TFA, emphasis mine)
"Several of these have now been taken into clinical development, and this review discusses the progress that has been made, as well as considering the requirements for licensing these new vaccines and how they might be used in the future."
It just wouldn't be a slashdot story if 'intellectual property' didn't pop up somewhere, now would it?
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It just wouldn't be a slashdot story if 'intellectual property' didn't pop up somewhere, now would it?
Do you really expect them to spend hundreds of millions of $ to develop them and then just give them away for free?
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Depends on who 'they' are. If it's a private outfit putting up their money in the hopes of developing a marketable product, no, I'd expect to see it priced at whatever premium over the current annual strain-specific vaccines they think that they can get.
If it's research done by one or more of the assorted state-funded public health medical research institutes or university researchers working under similar grants, then it's already been paid for, and I'd hope to see it being farmed out for production with a
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No but on the same note big pharma makes massive profits and it's executives get paid disgustingly high wages.
So you'll have to excuse me if I think that IP protections sway just a little bit too far in their favour right now because saving lives is kind of a bit more important than executives getting to have a gold plated circle jerk about how much their stock options are worth on the back of the latest financial results.
Could cause the flu to become more vicious. (Score:2, Informative)
Consider the feedback loop. In response to our actions, the flu itself will change.
We're already seeing how microbes are developing resistance [asiantribune.com] to antibiotics [wired.com], and how germs acquired during healthcare [medscape.com] are more virulent than those out there in the wild.
Do we want to incentivize the flu to mutate into something more vicious and fast-acting?
Sometimes, mother nature represents a balance between extremes. Somewhere between no-flu and a flu that resembles airborne superfast Ebola is the current balance.
I am not sa
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The gravity of the effects of viruses is not something that will increase due to evolutionary pressure.
In fact, most viruses have very little use for their host dying or functioning particularly badly. After all, a dead host is pretty bad at spreading the viral RNA or at least worse than one walking around. That is why Ebola is such a fail of a virus and viruses with mild effects are such a success (when looking at population count and age).
Some would point to HIV as having really bad effects on the host an
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It depends how effectively you distribute the vaccine, if you do it in bits and pieces over a spread of many years then yes there is a chance for the virus to mutate into something worse.
But if you do a nationwide vaccination programme in a year or two, one country at a time, then it has less chance to mutate before it's whiped out.
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Shut up. You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you even know that you are comparing apples to oranges?
Common Cold next? (Score:3, Interesting)
My understanding is that the Common Cold is based on six virus families, so a similar approach for each family could create a set of vaccines to eliminate colds.
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In related news.. (Score:2, Offtopic)
This just in! Nature moves closer to a flu immune to the "universal" vaccine.
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However, as others have pointed out, such an "immune flu" might be forced to be much milder by giving up structures which are so necessary that they exist in all flu strains. It's possible that, fifty years down the line, kids (immunized with the universal flu vaccine) might think of "getting the flu" the same way we think of "getting a 24 hour bug" today. You don't feel well for a day and then feel much better (as opposed to today's sick in bed and can't move for a week).
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Things don't evolve if you rip the underpinnings out.
This is why when using hand sanitizer, you use alcohol based ones.
Universalvaccine (Score:2)
So not only is it effective against the asian and bird flu's, it also works against Martian, Klingon and Vulcan types.
(And how about The Andromeda Strain ?)
Unintended consequences? (Score:2)
Should we be concerned about eliminating pathogens that we have co-evolved with and that help build our immune systems (for those of us that aren't killed by them)? Is there an unintended consequence building up here?
Or in other words - what could possibly go wrong?
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We may trade disease as a major killer to a major war.
Somewhere..... (Score:3)
Halloween 2012 (Score:2)
...and queue the opening credit sequence, the soundtrack, and the scenes of the population being mass innoculated before the "rage virus" mutation overtakes New York.
I don't get the flu anymore (Score:2)
Sure, when I was a kid, I'd get it once a year usually, for a day. Never longer. Haven't had it in like 20 years. Not sure what that means, but I do know it means I don't need to get vaccinated for it. Which works, because corporations like to get rid of old stock, which is never good for the flu that is currently going around. And they'll charge you also. boom! you just paid for last years flu vaccine.
Got to love capitalism.
Must be stopped! (Score:3)
Won't someone think of the children? If flu was not keeping those diseased little creatures in check they would be fornicating like bunnies!
Result of this vaccine (Score:2)
A few years- maybe even a couple decades of reduced flu.
Then new versions of the flu which change these sections hit with a vengence.
Hopefully we can rapidly prototype and produce vaccines by then.
Huge Impact if this works. (Score:2)
It would be nice to see ppl like gates quit focusing on health issues and focus instead on creating new tech such as a thorium nuke generator. Likewise, high speed train that can replace many roads woul
DRACO beat them to the punch (Score:2)
There is already a universal virus killer in development. And it doesn't target the virus. Instead it targets the cell hosting the virus. When a cell is virus infected it makes a specific protein, a "help I'm infected" RNA flag.
DRACO is two proteins bound together. When it sees the "help I'm infected" RNA, it breaks in two. Half of DRACO binds to it. The other half is a protein messenger that triggers apoptosis - cell death.
The end result is that any cell that has a virus in it commits suicide bef
Re:Accelerated Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
Probably not inconceivable; but there are a couple of points to consider: TFA mentions targeting structures that are 'highly conserved' between different virus subtypes. Typically(and I am not a molecular biologist, so feel free to cringe and/or correct me) the fact that a structure is 'highly conserved' between genetically distinct populations means that it is extremely important for some reason. Mutations happen(and very, very fast in influenza), so regions that aren't life-critical can diverge significantly over time. Life-critical regions, on the other hand, do experience mutations; but most of the mutants die. The degree of conservation across genetic lineages that diverged at a known period in the past can tell you a lot about how important that area is, even if you don't yet know exactly what it does.
Second, while this also doesn't preclude a really nasty bug, it is important to remember that diseases aren't little agents playing Pandemic 2 and trying for a high score. Killing your host can be a viable strategy, if you gain enough from doing so; but (in the very weak sense that mindless evolving virues can even have 'goals') the 'goal' isn't body count, it's survival and reproduction. Very high mortality is frequently counterproductive, because hosts die faster than the disease can spread to new ones. In broad strokes, high mortality tends to occur when a novel pathogen shows up for the first time; but ends up being selected against over time(see the classic attempt to use Myxoma virus against feral rabbits in Australia).
Re:Accelerated Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
It also means there's no selective push against it.
The is quite possibly a good reason we don't create immunities to that target site - possibly because there are beneficial internal fauna that use similar proteins (including, possibly, phages that kill threatening bacteria), or we ourselves have something that would also be targeted.
I strongly suspect such a vaccine will have NASTY side effects. The problem is, you cannot unvaccinate.
I don't believe that it is an accurate representation, but have you seen the BBC show Survivors? I doubt it will spread like it did in that show (because I doubt we'd use such an inoculation method, or be as careless), but I could see a similarly unpleasant result to those who get vaccinated.
Re:Accelerated Evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that we'll just have to kill a lot of fuzzy little animals in order to find out if those binding sites are specific to pathogens or whether they show up elsewhere...
Incidentally, if you want a category of vaccines that seems like it is just begging for dramatic trouble, how about Immunocontraceptives [wikipedia.org]? Already used with success in a variety of nuisance mammals; but uneconomic for use in smaller, more numerous, or harder-to-catch pests(because it has to be injected to work). So, logically enough, work is ongoing [nih.gov] to produce virally delivered vaccines that will spread themselves through the target population!
Re:Accelerated Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
That's not how evolution works.
Under the assumption that it is possible for a flu virus to easily mutate these particular antigens which appear to highly conserved (which is not a given...no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses), then it does not necessarily follow that the new strain would be more aggressive. This new strain could, in fact, very well be a much milder version. If these antigens are highly conserved, it's probably a part of what makes influenza evolutionarily successful. An adaptation that allows it to replicate and spread optimally. If true, and we attack these vectors, we're essentially changing the game such that the virus is now forced to have an adaptation which would have been less successful in the wild, in an environment without the vaccine.
After all, think about it. We didn't create more aggressive strains of polio or chickenpox once we created vaccines against those viruses. Instead, we pretty much annihilated those diseases.
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Re:Accelerated Evolution (Score:4, Insightful)
no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses
The ones who don't get run over by buses are more likely to be the ones who pay attention to what's around them or the ones who never leave the house. Both of those are good not-getting-run-over-by-a-bus survival strategies, and they can be passed down to the survivors' offspring.
That _is_ how evolution works.
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So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
You could make the same argument about ANY vaccine. It's a tradeoff between how many people you will save and the risk of creating something worse. But, so far at least, vaccines have paid off in a HUGE way. It's almost unheard of today for children to die of common diseases that used to routinely kill them in droves.
If anything, the real risk is that we will end up prolonging life so long that we'll end up with overpopulation and demographic problems (we're already seeing some of that now).
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It's almost unheard of today for children to die of common diseases that used to routinely kill them in droves.
...and so we breed weaker/less adaptive immune systems into the broader human population. There's always a tradeoff when you tamper with the mortality profile of a species, *especially* when it comes to allowing more individuals to reach reproductive age. It doesn't stop at the species (virus) you're directly targeting.
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Re:good vaccine (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah: Polio, Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, Malaria, Plague, Anthrax; all of those have historically been defeated by "exercise and vitamins and good food". That's why hardly anyone dies from them anymore. No, wait, sorry, my bad. It's because of vaccines, antibiotics, and sanitation. I always get those mixed up too.
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I must be missing something where malaria has been defeated. Perhaps you might like to inform the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation they are wasting their money.
However in general you are right.
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It's treatable now. People rarely die of it if they can get treatment. It was mostly fatal 100 years ago. It doesn't fit as well as some of the others, but Malaria is much less scary than it once was, even if it isn't "defeated".
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exercise and vitamins and good food.
Oh good, advice from a Slashdot armchair physician.
Unfortunately, what you don't know can quite literally kill you: the influenza virus can do more damage to young healthy people than the infirm, and some strains infect over 30% of the population, irrespective vitamin pills or yoga classes.
Read up on the 1918 flu pandemic [wikipedia.org] and then cytokine storms [wikipedia.org] to gain a glimmer of understanding into why research into a flu vaccine is more important than almost any public safety measure you can think of. Short of nuclear
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I got the '76 flu virus (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I got the '76 flu virus (Score:5, Informative)
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Exercise, vitamins and good food are essential for day-to-day health. If you have enough of those in your life, your chance of keeling over due to a heart attack will drop. However, this doesn't protect you against a viral attack. That's something that this stuff won't do a single thing against. Maybe your healthy body will weather the viral infection slightly better than someone who only sits on the couch eating junk food, but not by much. In fact, someone who sits on the couch eating junk food, but w
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Invention describes an innovative method of improving general physical health through combination of repetitive physical exertion, nutritional supplementation, and dietary selection.
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Vitamins don't sdo anything for you unless you are deficient. Even then, a lot of pills don't work well.
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Yeah... exercise is the best thing to do when you've got a 102F fever. That'll fix you right up.
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A vaccine is something you take prior to getting sick.
More specifically, a vaccine makes the disease a much less serious issue, as it enables the body's immune system to squish it very rapidly and with few ill effects. That is, it changes the nature of the disease as a process occurring in the body (and to our benefit); it's immune system hacking really.
Given that we're not the primary hosts for influenza, a general vaccine (if possible) will be highly beneficial. Well, provided it's restricted to people and not also used to try to partially stamp it out in th
Re:How many ways can you (Score:5, Insightful)
Research been showing more problems than prevention from vaccines
I'm going to use my annecdotal dataset of one. Let's see, people I know who've had vaccines. Hmm... all of them. Number of those people who have had negative side-effects.... none whatsoever. So, if there are more problems than prevention from vaccines, I'm not seeing it in my little slice of the world.
In fact, given that vaccination rates run at something from 70-90% in industrialised countries and we aren't seeing 70-90% of people suffering more than they might expect from polio, measles, influenza, etc. I'd say that claiming that vaccines do more harm than good is complete bullshit.
Anecdote (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes a tiny number of people have died of vaccines. Have you any idea of how many would have died without them?
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Perhaps you should do some research on what is in the metal fillings and why some people have bad or altered reactions. Maybe start here? http://www.naturalnews.com/007851.html [naturalnews.com]
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Re:How many ways can you (Score:5, Informative)
Correlation does not imply causation. Your co-worker's paralysis could could have been caused by a number of factors and probably was not thoroughly explored. The curezone article that was shown is a mis-mash of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed "articles" from main-stream, generally chemophobic press and even some of the books.
Even the recent thermisol flap was debunked by three research agencies in the US: CDC, FDA with the results being reviewed by three independent agencies (NAS-Institute of Medicine, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Still after this tremendous amount of research, we still have TV stars warning us about the evil of vaccines and those containing thermisol in particular. As people hear the tripe without investigating, the begin to believe then they stop immunizing their children, and as such we have seen a resurgance of childhood diseases such as whooping cough.
Generally speaking, flu vaccines won't "prevent' the flu as much as it helps reduce duration and severity of the sympotons, as the virus mutates pretty rapidly. One has to look at the risk/benefit of vaccination, not only for themselves but for society as a whole.
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Whatever.... as he is now going to be receiving compensation from our government for the rest of his life. He doesn't care what you as a taxpayer thinks.... shrug...
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Re:removing the right to fight for your life (Score:5, Insightful)
Make sure you actually do the "keep away from people" bit. Then hopefully it'll just be you and your family dieing from preventable diseases and not the rest of us.
Re:removing the right to fight for your life (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a crock of shit, sir. Every time you vaccinate, you challenge the immune system, and you bring it to a state of readiness for the next attack. It's only people whose immune systems are naive to the invader that actually come down with the disease. That's the whole fucking point of vaccination!
I don't care if your daughter dies. I don't care if her 90-year-old grandparents die. I do care if I come down with a case of whooping cough from a carrier like her.
Fortunately, I won't have to worry about that for another 10 years, because a lot of people have wrongly thought that pertussis was one of those diseases of the 60s/70s that had been wiped out by vaccination, and forgot that there was a booster shot available. Some antivax fucktard cow orker of mine infected three of us and knocked my team's productivity down for a month.
Re:removing the right to fight for your life (Score:5, Insightful)
That makes no sense. A vaccination only makes someone's immune system work harder, earlier. It is just like "playing in the dirt", only with particularly useful dirt.
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Re:removing the right to fight for your life (Score:4, Insightful)
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You knew by posting this here you were going to get slammed, right? When it comes to vaccines, the scientific minded community does not allow any room for criticism, doubt or deviation from their position that all vaccines are a godsend and beyond reproach. Doubts and skepticism are at the core of the scientific movement-- except when it comes to this issue. Instead you're just called a conspiracy theorist and a nut.
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there's a fundamental problem with all these vaccines, which is summed up flippantly as "what doesn't kill ya makes ya stronger"... by vaccinating children against various disease - by giving their immune systems an "easy ride" - their immune systems simply do not develop to the same extent that a child would if they had the actual disease and had to fight for their life.
Yeah, tell that to my friend Mike, who has a twisted arm and hand and a twisted leg because he had polio fifty years ago. Guess what? Neit
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Everything Dr. Hadwen said has been thouroughly debunked, many times over. If you've deluded yourself enough to think otherwise I know you won't read these, but I'll leave the links here just in case:
https://draust.wordpress.com/2008/06/04/who-needs-facts-these-vaccine-conspiracy-pieces-write-themselves%E2%80%A6/ [wordpress.com]
http://skepticalsurfer.blogspot.com/2007/09/terminology-aggressive-vs-conservative.html [blogspot.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vaccine_controversies/Archive_2 [wikipedia.org]
http://reasonablehank.com/2012/02/06/judy-jud [reasonablehank.com]
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If the health care professionals I have inquired of are at all credible, then the flu I get every time I go to get immunized is caused by contact with the vectors standing in line. (My credulity is rather strained in this regard.) Hand washing is not always enough. Perhaps a mask next time?
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Yes we have. That was a horrible article which can only be summed up as 'A lie'.
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I'm sure the same techniques will function in biological viruses - both from the virus attack point of view and the medical defenders.
You'd be wrong.
And while I'm not an Influenza researcher now, I was one for five years, and there's a pretty good chance I helped supply a good deal of the data being used to work on this.
The human immune system doesn't do bitwise comparisons with the viral genome. It does more of a heuristic match against the functional shape of the created proteins. The problem is that very minor changes in the viral genome can produce functionally significant changes in the shape of the proteins. One of the easier-to-s