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Before the varicella vaccine became widely available in 1995, some parents would encourage a case of chicken pox in their children, as enduring the disease would cause immunity and it is less dangerous in children than for adults. Decades ago when I was young, no encouragement was needed as chicken pox, measles, and mumps swept through schools every year -the same way smallpox and diphtheria spread before vaccines were developed. Since most children are innoculated these days, it’s not so easy to find a case of chicken pox to catch, so some vaccine-wary parents are going online to have it delivered …by mail!
One post from a Facebook group called “Find a Pox Party in Your Area” (a closed group, but with pictures of its hundreds of members) reads, ”I got a Pox Package in mail just moments ago. I have two lollipops and a wet rag and spit.” Another woman warns, “This is a federal offense to intentionally mail a contagion.” Another woman answers, “Tuck it inside a zip lock baggy and then put the baggy in the envelope : ) Don’t put anything identifying it as pox.” Very clever.
I’m sure employees of the postal service appreciate such subterfuge. The fact remains that the practice is illegal. And didn’t we learn back in the ’80s that sharing bodily fluids with strangers is dangerous? Link
(Image credit: Jelene Morris)
Bill Gates is only 56 years old, but he stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft a decade ago. He’d still be the richest man in America if he and his wife Melinda hadn’t been so busy giving money away. And instead of just donating, they did the research to determine how they would get the most bang for the buck. As it turns out, those bucks get a lot of bang when you use them to buy simple vaccines. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has gone through 25 billion dollars to not only get vaccines to children who need them, but to change the way that vaccines are developed, manufactured, and distributed globally.
The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.
“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.
Read about how they did it at Forbes. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science
Love cats but have cat allergy? Well, hang in there – scientists are closing in on a cat allergy vaccine that will let you have your cat fix without the sniffles:
A mix of seven synthetic peptides makes up the vaccine. The idea, the researchers wrote, is that the immune system will encounter these peptide strands, which fit into the immune cells like a key to a lock, and recognize them as harmless. That action stops the sniffling, sneezing inflammatory response in its tracks, even when the peptides are attached to real cat proteins.
An early clinical trial on 88 patients resulted in no serious side effects, the researchers reported. A single injection reduced the skin’s inflammatory reaction to cat allergens by 40 percent, the researchers wrote.
You can get a swine flu vaccination at Walgreens. To advertise that fact, they put stickers on other products, but do they say “vaccine”? No, the stickers just say “H1N1 Available Here”, which won’t make much sense once you get these products home. Link -via J-Walk Blog
On October 26th, 1977, a hospital cook in Somalia named Ali Maow Maalin was diagnosed with smallpox. What makes this so remarkable is that no naturally-occurring cases of smallpox have been diagnosed in the 32 years since.
The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980[10][48] as Resolution WHA33.3. The first two sentences of the resolution read: “Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America.”[49]
Smallpox once killed millions of people every year, and may have been responsible for up to 500 million deaths in the 20th century. National vaccination programs began in the early 1800s, but it was a global push by the World Health Organization begun in 1958 that finally led to the eradication of the disease worldwide. Link -via Bad Astronomy Blog
(image credit: CDC)
Donald G. McNeil, Jr. writes in The New York Times that a new vaccine tested on 16,000 Thai volunteers demonstrated improved resistance to the virus that causes AIDS. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it’s a significant discovery. McNeil writes:
Col. Jerome H. Kim, a physician who is manager of the army’s H.I.V. vaccine program, said half the 16,402 volunteers were given six doses of two vaccines in 2006 and half were given placebos. They then got regular tests for the AIDS virus for three years. Of those who got placebos, 74 became infected, while only 51 of those who got the vaccines did.
Although the difference was small, Dr. Kim said it was statistically significant and meant the vaccine was 31.2 percent effective.
Dr. Fauci said that scientists would seldom consider licensing a vaccine less than 70 or 80 percent effective, but he added, “If you have a product that’s even a little bit protective, you want to look at the blood samples and figure out what particular response was effective and direct research from there.”
Before you get your hopes up, keep in mind this warning from Zach Weiner about science journalism. We still have a long way to go.
Link via Popular Science
Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Medical researchers are developing an innovative way of delivering malaria vaccine:
In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a “vaccine” of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.
Link via Instapundit
Scientists may finally be on the cusp of finding a vaccine for the Ebola virus. According to an article in EurekAlert:
Because Ebola virus is so dangerous, producing and testing a vaccine is extremely challenging for the scientists. One significant factor slowing down progress has been that there are only a very limited number of high containment facilities with staff capable and authorised to conduct the research.
“Ebola virus is a Biosafety Level 4 threat, along with many other haemorrhagic fever viruses”, says Dr Sanchez. “As well as the difficulty in getting the right staff and facilities, vaccines for viruses like Ebola, Marburg and Lassa fever have been difficult to produce because simple ‘killed’ viruses that just trigger an antibody response from the blood are not effective. For these viruses we need to get a cell-mediated response, which involves our bodies producing killer T-cells before immunity is strong enough to prevent or clear an infection.”
The researchers have now used several different recombinant DNA techniques, which have allowed them to trigger a cell-mediated response and produce a vaccine that is effective in non-human primates. One of the candidate vaccines is about to be tested on people for the first time, after entering Phase 1 clinical trials in autumn 2006.
I’m old enough to still remember the early 90s, when movies like Outbreak and books like The Hot Zone had a firm grip on the popular imagination. There was a mystique about these deadly diseases that people just found utterly compelling. I can’t really speculate why, except to say that that maybe it’s the same reason people find serial killers compelling too: We long to know why/how they do what they do. But, like serial killers, we’ll probably never understand any of them completely. We just need to be able to stop them.
Here’s wishing Dr. Sanchez good luck at the CDC today, where he’ll be presenting Ebola vaccine developments!
