Super-Vaccine For Flu In Development

Adam9 tipped us to a DailyMail article about the possibility of a revolutionary flu vaccine that could work against all strains of the Influenza A disease. This 'holy grail' of vaccines would work on everything from the annual 'winter flu' to the 'bird flu'. The best part is that just a few vaccinations may provide complete immunity, unlike the annual boosters are current defenses require. From the article: "The new jabs would be grown in huge vats of bacterial 'soup', with just two pints of liquid providing 10,000 doses of vaccine. Current flu vaccines focus on two proteins on the surface of the virus. However, these constantly mutate in a bid to fool the immune system, making it impossible for vaccine manufacturers to keep up with the creation of each new strain. The universal vaccines focus on a different protein called M2, which has barely changed during the last 100 years."

Comments

Re:Is a cure enough?

[MightyYar]

True, but this requires one shot - then you are protected for some short period of time. TB is bacterial and has no vaccine. Most of the patients are either drug users and/or have compromised immune systems (e.g. AIDS). Worse, the cure is a 6-9 month course of antibiotics. It is hard to consistently take antibiotics for 6 months even if you are well - a heroin addict can be much less reliable and may miss doses or abandon treatment. So now we have antibiotic resistant strains... etc.

In short, it's a much different problem. Hell, the flu even goes away on its own over 99% of the time. Frankly, I think that if we could cure AIDS, I think that TB would largely go along with it in the developed world.

Re:Do fix-alls really exist?

[MightyYar]

I know that in my business (semiconductor assembly equipment), we introduced a new low-end machine that invaded a competitor's formerly exclusive niche. Our machine was much faster upon introduction. As soon as we got on-site, our competitor showed up and was able to nearly double the speed of their machine in a few hours with a software patch. The intended effect, no doubt, was to show how much better their machine was then ours so that the customer wouldn't bother buying our equipment. Instead, the customer was infuriated that our competition had been "sandbagging" all this time, throttling down their machines so that the customer would have to buy more units to meet demand. In response, we now get 50% of their orders with our slightly slower machine - just to "keep them honest".

You need to watch out if you are considering holding back from your customers, and you see it on the consumer level, too. The iPod wouldn't even be around today if Sony hadn't sandbagged with their Walkman follow-ons. Artificially restricting your product is usually not very healthy in the long-term.