vaccine
sa smith | October 19, 2011Conceptually, vaccines are very simple things-- Dummy viruses/bacteria/pathogen that train your immune system how to fight the real viruses/bacteria/pathogen. All the benefits of being sick (training your B- and/or T-cells how to fight the pathogen) without actually having to get sick.
Nice.
In practice, however, things are infinitely more difficult. Sometimes we use dead viruses. Sometimes we use crippled viruses. Sometimes we dont need to use whole viruses at all-- little chunks of the virus are fine. Sometimes we just need chunks of the virus, but we keep them dressed up in hollow…
gregladen | October 18, 2011There are several reasons why there is no vaccine for malaria, but the thing you might want to know is that malaria is not a virus, and it is not even a bacterium. It's a protist. Generally speaking, there are not really vaccines for such organisms. One metastudy that looked specifically at Malaria had this to report:
We identify and evaluate 1916 immunization studies between 1965-February 2010, and exclude partially or nonprotective results to find 177 completely protective immunization experiments. Detailed reexamination reveals an unexpectedly mundane basis for selective vaccine…
sa smith | July 19, 2011Part I: HPV
Part II: Measles
Part III: More Measles
Its July 18th. A little over half-way into 2011. And in Ethiopia, about 18,000 people have gotten measles, with a touch over 100 dead.
There has also been an outbreak in Somali refugee camps in Kenya, with almost 500 sick and 11 dead.
Meanwhile, here in the US, we have antivaxers throwing money away on snake-oil to cure their children of autism (and the collection of non-medically recognized that seem to go along with seeing woo-treatment from autism experts charlatans, like OCD-like dietary rituals and paranoia about 'multiple chemical…
sa smith | July 7, 2011I have written quite a bit about Cytotoxic-T-Cell-based HIV-1 vaccines here on ERV. Though antibodies can target HIV-1 viruses, and HIV-1 infected cells, CTLs should be the go-to workhorses for killing HIV-1 infected cells.
Pimped-up Souped-up Bionic Assassin Lethal Weapon Killer T-Cells as a cure for AIDS?
HIV-1 CTL Vaccine: OH SHI-
HIV-1 Vaccine: Again, OH SHI-
HIV-1 CTL Vaccine: lol, we are screwed.
HIV-1: Humans are all pink on the inside. Pink, and CD4+ T-cells.
Found another one:
HIV-1 CTL Vaccine: $%@#!
Because HIV-1 is a virus, it uses all of the host cells machinery to produce…
sa smith | April 7, 2011A couple of days ago, Orac directed us towards an article that is one of the funniest pieces of 'Science Journalism' I have ever seen, anywhere. See, those of us on the 'non-kook' side of things have marvelously eloquent writers like Carl and Ed, and inquisitive investigatory journalists like Trine. Sure theyre 'educational', but their work is depressingly devoid of 'WTF LOL!!' moments like this piece by an apparent anti-vax 'science' journalist, Sharyl Attkisson:
The author is Helen Ratajczak, surprisingly herself a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm. Ratajczak did what…
gregladen | February 8, 2011A Better Grip: T Cells Strengthen Our Hand against Influenza Clinical Infectious Diseases, 52 (1), 8-9 DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciq018Flu vaccines are important and useful, but also relatively ineffective compared to many other vaccines. Immunity is imperfect, there are many 'strains' of influenza in a given year only some of which are addressed by the available vaccine (though often the most common ones) and one year's vaccine does not provide immunity to subsequent years' influenza because the virus changes so much. Well, actually that's not exactly true: The influenza virus has various…
lborkowski | January 26, 2011Cholera has killed roughly 3,800 people in Haiti and sickened another 189,000, and it will continue to circulate in the population for the foreseeable future. The good news is that the number of new cases per week has dropped from 12,000, which it reached in November, to about 4,700, and the mortality rate has also decreased. Intensive treatment and prevention efforts (including provision of clean water and educational campaigns) have saved thousands of lives, and will have to continue even as the attention of the international community wanes.
David Cyranoski of Nature News points out that…
pronald | January 21, 2011DESPITE overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism -- a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare. says Michael Willrich, a professor of history at Brandeis University in todays NYT
Similarly, according to Dr Oz, the TV host, papaya genetically engineered with a snippet of a mild strain of a virus to make it disease free, causes infertility. This in face of overwhelming evidence…
gregladen | January 17, 2011It is very reasonable for a parent to worry about vaccines. For one thing, most of them involve sticking the baby or child with a sharp object, thus making the little one cry, and it would be abnormal to not have an automatic reaction to that. For another thing, they are drugs, in a sense. When the little one is ill, and you call in to the health care facility in the hopes that there will be some useful advice, most of the time you hear "No, we no longer recommend giving [fill in the blank with a medicine you thought might work] to children under [one or two months older than your child].…
lborkowski | November 29, 2010Given that Haiti is suffering from the devastation of a major earthquake and a cholera epidemic, it's not surprising that voters yesterday encountered disorganized polling places where many were told their names weren't on the rolls. But there were also reports of violence and intimidation, polling places being ransacked and ballot boxes ripped open, and ballot-stuffing. In the afternoon, 12 of the 19 candiates for president joined together and called for the election to be canceled.
Meanwhile, the cholera epidemic continues. Haitian authorities report that more than 1,600 people have died…
oracknows | July 15, 2010As much fun as I had at TAM8, there is one consequence of being out of town and not paying attention to the blog or the Internet as much as I usually do. Well, actually, there are multiple consequences. One is a momentary lapse in insanity. In other words, it's good for the mental health to cut back on the blogging. True, such is the level of my insanity that I didn't just stop altogether for five or six days, as I probably should have, but what can I say? Another consequence is that inevitably one or more things pop up that under normal conditions I'd be going full mental Orac on that…
lborkowski | July 1, 2010It's Zombie Day on ScienceBlogs! Scicurious at Neurotopia kicked things off, and Joseph of Ataraxia Theatre (whose other projects include the GearHead roleplaying game) provided the cool zombie illustrations.
Thanks to the DC Department of Health's excellent disease surveillance system, a recent outbreak of zombies in the nation's capital was detected quickly enough to allow for capture and isolation of all cases, and no further transmission of the zombie virus has been observed. All state and local health and law enforcement departments have been alerted to the outbreak and instructed on…
gregladen | April 25, 2010First, let's get this straight. I'm all for anti-science anti-vaxer right wingers not being vaccinated, as long as a) we take their children away from them (and vaccinate the poor dears) and b) isolate the adult anti-vaxers from the rest of the species, perhaps in Texas. But in the meantime, let's look at the latest bit of (mis)information from the utterly insane side of our society. If nothing else, this story may serve to remind us all what we are fighting about.... not the attitude of this or that skeptics, or which movements should or should not be engaged in chopping the pope down to…
oracknows | February 4, 2010I realize I complain periodically about when I get into what seems to me to be a rut in which I'm writing pretty much only about anti-vaccine lunacy. This is just such a week, when the news on the vaccine front has been coming fast and furious, first with Andrew Wakefield's being found to have behaved unethically and dishonestly by the British General Medical Council, only to be followed up a few days later with the news that the editors of The Lancet had retracted his 1998 paper, the paper that started the MMR scare in the U.K. and launched a thousand autism quacks. Meanwhile, the cranks…
sporte | January 13, 2010Is there a place for citizen scientists in the world of digital biology?
Many of the citizen science projects that I've been reading about have a common structure. There's a University lab at the top, outreach educators in the middle, and a group of citizens out in the field collecting data.
After the data are collected, they end up in a database somewhere and the University researchers analyze them and write papers. At least that's my impression so far.
It seems to me, that with all kinds of databases out there, on-line, there should be plenty of opportunity for both citizens and student…
gregladen | October 31, 2009I spent about 45 minutes yesterday in the local HMO clinic. They had turned the main waiting room into a Pandemic Novel A/H1N1 Swine (nee Mexican) Influenza quarantine area, and I could feel the flu viruses poking at my skin looking for a way in the whole time I was there.
Amanda, who is 8.3 months pregnant, started getting symptoms of the flu two days ago. As a high school teacher in a school being affected in a state being affected (as most are) she is at high risk for this. She was one of the first people around here to get the vaccine, just a couple of days ago, but it takes about 10…
gregladen | September 11, 2009Think back to the last time you had a bad coughing fit. It's gross, but think about the saliva and the mucus. Think about the last time you threw up. Now imagine all that together, along with gasping for air-and not being able to swallow.
And then go read this.
palmd | April 23, 2009It's no secret that I think the Huffington Post is an teeming den execrable pseudoscientific snakes. Still, when it comes to fanning the vaccination manufatroversy, they are really off the deep end. Take the latest piece of dreck on Jenny McCarthy, GoD (Google Doctorate). It's written by the infamous "Dr." Patricia Fitzgerald, and this is where I get cranky. Worse than all the drivel spouted by Jenny is HuffPo giving their imprimatur of authority to Fitzgerald. Let me 'splain.
Look, there's a lot of ways to legitimately gain the title of "doctor". The most common are to go to a…
palmd | April 23, 2009Orac isn't known for his sound bites. He tends to write pieces which, in the blogosphere, might be considered rather long, and for good reason---he has a lot to say, and he says it well. But sometimes there is a gem of insolence that is so apt, it must be reshared:
But what really makes this analogy so brain dead is that it was the very epidemiological methods that have so consistently failed to find any correlation between vaccines and autism that led scientists to realize that smoking is strongly correlated with cancer. Jim [Carrey], while accepting the epidemiology linking tobacco smoke…
palmd | April 2, 2009"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"
"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"
"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."
We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it…