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Oxford University Tests Universal Flu Vaccine
dbune writes "A universal flu vaccine has been tested by scientists at Oxford University. '... the vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains, instead of those that sit on the virus's external coat, which are liable to mutate. If used widely a universal flu vaccine could prevent pandemics, such as the swine flu outbreaks of recent years, and end the need for a seasonal flu jab.'"
This almost sounds too good to be true.
This... *sunglasses* ...is nothing to sneeze at.
YEAAAAAAAAAAH!
Does it cause autism?
counting toothpicks and knowing when to double down.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
The worldwide death toll from the flu and its complications is in the hundreds of thousands. This is potentially more than just preventing an occasional annoying illness. It's more on the order of preventing all fatalities from traffic accidents.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Shrinkage and uncontrollable flatulence.
Well, it's as realistic as it causing autism or metal toxicity via thermasol.
Isn't this how most modern zombie movies start?
Part of the reason that those parts of the virus change is because we target them, and therefore cause evolutionary selection. This will work for one year like any other vaccine and become obsolete. No part of any quickly-evolving virus is too vital to change.
that could maybe explain how this might work?
So, instead of injecting with weakened viruses so that the body can create anti-bodies that attach to the viruses and de-activate them;
This vaccine injects flu proteins that makes T-cells target flu infected cells?
Bet it won't work against the Thelusian flu.
Have gnu, will travel.
Will one shot be sufficient to turn me completely autistic? Or do I need booster shots? I'd better consult the best source possible: Jenny McCarthy. I hear she's, like, awesome with autism.
This will be great if the changes necessary to get around it make it unable to infect humans. After all, influenza does infect pigs and birds.
FWIW, there's a bit of precedent here: no infectious form of syphilis has ever developed penicillin resistance. As I understand it, there have been some strains developed in laboratories that are penicillin-resistant, but none of them are capable of infecting human cells. IOW, there is a possibility that in mutating so that the proteins are no longer recognized by cells sensitized by this vaccine, the influenza virus will become incapable of infecting humans.
Hope it will work against stronger virus like the H1N1 and Super Virus. The viruses have claimed so many lives aground the world and it's really sad to have more down with flu. Google Sniper 2.0
Cue the GMO/Jenny McCarthy lot.
The Flu and the Common Cold are both viruses that mutate often, right? Would the same idea work for the common cold?
Please excuse my ignorance if there is an obvious reason why this wouldn't work. My degrees are in computers not medicine.
The treatment – using a new technique and tested for the first time on humans infected with flu –
You don't give vaccines to people who are already infected. I realize that this vaccine attacks a whole class, but it's not going to be much good on a specific virus that has already infected the body.
I can't wait until we can easily live to be 150 and be extremely healthy with no chance of disease. Plus you've got to be careful with Space Aids
...because it will shut down the Big Pharma Yearly Flu Jab Money Train.
Choo! Choo! Ka-Ching!
According to the BBC, those who've had the swine flu get super-immunity to the common cold amongst other things.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12152500
I can confirm this to some degree. I had Swine Flu almost two years ago. It sucked. But I have not gotten sick since. Had a couple of those days where you feel like you're going to get a cold, but nothing more than that.
Poor Randall Flagg...
On the contrary, they will produce this vaccine. Especially since it does nothing to address animal reservoirs of influenza, so they get to sell vaccines to everyone in the world and since influenza is not eradicated by it - for a long time.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You guys should know that the more oxygen is in your body then the higher your PH level and you simply can't get sick because the virus can't penetrate the cell wall as well as the Immune System is at it's prime to isolate foreign bodies.
If you have a zit or any kind of puss on your body, either from an ingrown hair or a foot injury, perhaps from a food allergy, then you will discover that the puss is a super-high PH like around 13 because that is the body's way of enclosing and pushing-out the invasive things it encounters; it's why some people drink small amounts of food-grade (25%) hydrogen peroxide with some of their vegetable smoothies and juicers because the more oxygenated your body then the more toxins your body can properly identify for ejection. It's how heavy-metals are broken from fats, so your body is rid of that matterial known as "cellulite." I'm not recommending you to drink some of the verry puss off your nerdy faces, but the secretions of your nostrils has been an enticement to some suggestive behaviour continuing this day from many childhoods: boogers are high-PH too, and scientists say the healthier individuals recycle their mucus, so take a hint guys.
You don't need Vaccinations, and they are realy more a kind of innoculation than their advertisers are willing to admit. Just get your nutrition, and oxygenetate your body, and you can't get sick.
No, you mean American drug manufacturers won't manufacture this vaccine. Other drug companies will and it won't be for sale in the USA.
We all know that the drug manufacturers wont produce this vaccine. Currently they have a constant revenue stream with a new vaccine needed seasonly. Greed is better than a cure. It's a false hope.
Why does this nonsense always get a mod-up?
Look around you.
See anyone dying of Smallpox? Measles? Polio? Diphtheria? Tetanus? Has your daughter received the HPV - Cervical Cancer vaccine?
There is big money to made in treating cancer.
Why do you suppose that this vaccine wasn't suppressed?
The answer is that the cure brings with it a new level of understanding. It exposes opportunites that had never before been seiously considered.
When most men and women were in failing health along about age 45 or so, it didn't make much sense to put real money into studying arthritis, cancer, glaucoma, senile dementias, and so on.
"If used widely a universal flu vaccine could prevent pandemics, such as the swine flu outbreaks of recent years, and end the need for a seasonal flu jab." I didn't read the journal article, but it sounds as though somebody's advocating distributing this vaccine every year during flu season (prophylactically). If a vaccine is successful, shouldn't we hold on to it and only distribute it during potential emergencies such as the emergence of H1N1? I would think the last thing we should be doing is breeding super vaccine-resistant flu viruses by over-medicating. It seems like whenever a new treatment is discovered, we deploy it immediately. Suppose if we deployed this new flu vaccine, in the best case scenario, we could save a hundred thousand lives per year, every year, for a decade or two, (and there's probably a lot of profit to be made in the process). But if we distribute the vaccine sparingly, perhaps it would remain effective for longer, and we could save tens of millions of lives when the next pandemic hits. It's an interesting mathematical dilemma, but I've never seen anybody bring this up. What is the best solution? (I've had this question for a while. It seems like a great question for the slashdot crowd.)
the vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains
Huzza! Resistant Virus strains of the world, UNITE! The time has come for those of us in minority to rise up against our new protein targeting foe! Our cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers have been killed by these anti-protein wielding vaccinologists!
Behold the folly of their folly! They ignore us outliers, complacent that we have not the capability to fill the niches left by our lost brethren.
TL;DR: Meh, mutants; The ones you don't target will become the next Flu epidemic -- Do we really want to breed viruses which are that much harder to kill?
Just like the polio vaccine created super polio, and the smallpox vaccine created monstro-pox, which subsequently ravaged the greater Eurasian continent before - hey wait a minute! That's what I get for using Wikopedia instead of the real thing!
This is a pretty interesting result. Essentially all vaccines as we know them function by coaxing our immune system to manufacture antibodies against a particular target. Because antibodies are floating around in the blood stream, they are pretty much restricted to attacking whatever the virus is presenting on its surface. Most of the time, the best things to be glomming onto as an antibody would be the protein structures that are responsible for the virus latching onto cells and getting its genome into the cell. If you can stop it at this stage, then you can prevent viruses from getting into cells in the first place.
The vaccine candidate in this study is a cytotoxic T-lymphocyte (CTL)-based vaccine that stimulates a completely different arm of our adaptive immune system. This is the cellular system, that functions by manufacturing lots of little molecules (human leukocyte antigens, HLAs) that glom onto the proteins that the virus tricks our own cellular machinery into making. Parts of virus proteins look distinctly different from human proteins because they usually have different tasks to accomplish. The important thing here is that our HLAs are glomming onto protein fragments that are not folded - they are still linear strings of amino acids. In contrast, antibodies have to glom onto virus proteins that have already been manufactured and folded - this makes the target a lot more complex. So from a vaccine manufacturing standpoint, it is a lot easier to synthesize a bunch of short protein fragments than it is to assemble a folded virus structure that sufficiently resembles the actual virus that it can raise an effective antibody response.
This is a total change in the game because a CTL-based vaccine has to wait for the virus to get into cells before it can do anything about it. (This may be why the authors mention incorporating this into a composite vaccine that includes antibody-raising components also.) This is also interesting because CTL-based vaccines have been tried against HIV, but they have failed spectacularly. This preliminary success may be due to the fact that our immune system is usually capable of clearing an influenza infection on its own, whereas HIV infections are forever.
Can the same method be used to generate a vaccine for the H.I.V?
Let me show you my thing; it's the most advanced on the planet.
Given that neither polio nor smallpox ever mutated against their respective vaccines, that's doubtful. Also the flu genome varies greatly that at anytime, one strain could become the next big one. The universal flu vaccine simplifies the whole process for the seasonal varieties so that we don't need to bother with making vaccines for those.
Is it bad that I read this article while I was playing Pandemic 2? I wanted to take a shot at infecting Madagascar again, and now I realize that it's 4 hours later.
So, what you're saying is that if we can eliminate a virus to within five nines of total dead, the 0.001% won't be around to cause havoc... The polio vaccine didn't eradicate polio; in fact, new outbreaks in 3rd world countries have occurred, how long until a mutation renders the current vaccines against polio ineffective?
100 years? More? Meh, you won't be alive then, what do you care.
Oh, and Smallpox is totally not a problem anymore.
Those 2010 outbreaks are surely just flukes. No cause for alarm folks, we've got that whole biology thing understood, constrained and conquered.
</sarcasm>
Hint: even your highly esteemed Wikipedia has a list of epidemics. Cholera in 2009? Bubonic Plague in 2008?! WTF!
You're deluding yourself If you think any thing short of tens of generations of world wide quality health care improvements are going to eradicate some of these diseases.
Vaccinating only a percentage of the populous? Don't make me laugh. Chances are, the viruses will evolve faster due to our forcing the hand of natural selection... But who cares, at least you're vaccinated, right?
the vaccine targets proteins inside the flu virus that are common across all strains
Huzza! Resistant Virus strains of the world, UNITE! The time has come for those of us in minority to rise up against our new protein targeting foe! Our cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers have been killed by these anti-protein wielding vaccinologists!
Behold the folly of their folly! They ignore us outliers, complacent that we have not the capability to fill the niches left by our lost brethren.
TL;DR: Meh, mutants; The ones you don't target will become the next Flu epidemic -- Do we really want to breed viruses which are that much harder to kill?
Have you ever heard of smallpox? Mass smallpox vaccinations totally created a worldwide pandemic superbug, there.
Why is this FUD modded up?
Those 2010 outbreaks are surely just flukes. No cause for alarm folks, we've got that whole biology thing understood, constrained and conquered.
In every single case of an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, it's easily traced to anti-vaccination hysteria. In other words, we do in fact have the biology understood; the only reason it's not "constrained and conquered" is because there's no vaccine for stupidity.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Make it look like an accident...
Just by the time i was fighting with my flu, i clicked to read this article. When is coming to the pharmacies??
Really? Because I am not seeing an epidemic of highly resistant hepatitis C strains, do you?
IANAnE (Epidemologist) but I would think that the likelihood of creating virii that would be invulnerable to the vaccine would depend on whether there would be selection pressure to make it so. While the virii are being transmitted from human to human there is obvious selection pressure for those strains that are resistant. However I believe that most flu epidemics originate in animal (other species) hosts which serve as a long-term reservoir. It is when they cross the species barrier (typically in south-east Asia where humans and domesticated animals live in intimate proximity) that they infect humans. They become a serious threat when they gain the ability to be transmitted from human to human but (I believe) the strain is wiped out once the pandemic has run its course (and everyone who has been exposed has either been vaccinated, been infected and developed immunity or, is dead).
So it seems that this vaccine would still remain effective because there is no selection pressure against the virii in their animal hosts. Only those virii that had managed to infect humans would be selected against and since these do not re-contribute to the base genetic pool there would not be any pressure for the virii in the animal hosts to evolve an immunity to the vaccine. Of course it is possible that once the virii has managed to start spreading human to human that that strain would evolve immunity to the vaccine. But since it, like most (all?) flu strains would be wiped out at the end of the epidemic, the genetic makeup of the population would not have changed.
This presumes that overzealous farmers do not use this vaccine to cut down on the losses of their livestock. Then it IS possible (likely? inevitable?) that immunity will spread, rendering the vaccine useless. Perhaps legislation is in order to prevent the (ab)use of the vaccine in the way that anti-biotics have been heavily used by the livestock industry to boost animal size.
(I could very well be making some huge conceptual errors due to ignorance. Professional input is very much welcomed!)
Viruses are subject to intense selection pressure. They live in hosts, most of which have immune systems tying to get rid of them, That means there's little place for niceties. There are tons of tradeoffs between different abilities. For instance, the ability to jump from host to host improves the evolutionary fitness, as does not killing the host. But these two are quite orthogonal: the less you're likely to kill your host, the less the need to jump from host to host. More simple strains need to produce less proteins per virus particle and can crank out more virus particle per infected cell, which enforces the need for tradeoffs
This vaccine ups the ante in one area. Sure, this will mean that certain strains gain an advantage, but those strains tend to be more complex. That means less virus particles produced per infected cell, or a tradeoff in another area. That's almost certainly a win from the host perspective.
We can't kill viruses with anything but the immune system anyway. Vaccines just "prime" everyone's immune system to recognize the virus so it responds faster and you don't get sick/get less sick...
Not a sentence!
One Vaccine to rule them all, One Vaccine to find them,
One Vaccine to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Firstly, we don't know for sure that a resistant strain CAN exist. Not every threat to a species can be evolved around quickly and easily, you know. I'm reminded of the slashdotters who read about mosquito-killing lasers and immediately assumed that we would be overrun by newly-evolved laserproof mosquitoes. Evolution does not work that way.
Secondly, assuming a resistant strain does emerge, who says it will be harder to kill? Most adaptations come at a price, and in this case the price might be "vulnerable to some form of treatment that the other strains were immune to". Or it might be "nowhere near as dangerous as the old flu virus variants". Or it could even be "nowhere near as transmissible as the old strains."
Thirdly, what exactly do you mean "harder to kill"? The flu virus mutates into a bazillion different strains all the time anyway, that's the whole reason WHY there hasn't been a single jab up until now. If your super-scary-ooh-gonna-kill-us-all-new-jab-resistant strain is even possible, then it probably already exists out there right now somewhere, or at least is just a few mutations away. We can't kill it now. We wouldn't be able to kill it if we started protecting people against the other flu variants. Going from "can't kill it" to "can't kill it" isn't a change in the level of hard-to-killness.It's not making it "harder to kill", it's not changing it at all.
At the very least, we would be narrowing the parameters within which the flu virus can thrive, reducing the number of variants that can threaten us.
To be widely available.
I'll believe it, when I see it.
"Do we really want to breed viruses which are that much harder to kill?"
I hate this argument, as it is akin to the following:
"why do I have to take a shower, I'll just get dirty again"
"why do I want to get better, I'll just get sick again"
Yes, actually, we do want to breed more resistant bacteria. You know, because it would save the 36000 people that die annually in the United States alone (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/08/26/129456941/annual-flu-death-average-fluctuates-depending-on-how-you-slice-it). If your solution saves thousands of lives today, and may take extra effort to save those lives tomorrow, you implement.
Side note: it's not like MRSA is extra-deadly, it is just harder to kill. if MRSA was immune to antibiotics we would be in the same situation as if we hadn't treated at all. Yes, resistant-strain bacteria are a big problem. No, we should never not treat because of it.
But what about bacteria? are there any NEW antibiotics? because we sure are gonna need them in the near future. Yesterday's powerful antibiotics are now mostly useless...
But no, lets pin everything on virii and just ignore that serious infections are in majority actually bacterial (and of course lets ignore even further that fungal infections are difficult to cure and can be fatal).
Enjoy your sepsis people of the future!
It'll kill all of the old flu virus strains with this particular common protein, leaving novel new mutants to take over. Ones to which we have no immunity whatsoever.
Unintended consequences...ugh.
So it will work for alien critters that might otherwise be vulnerable to Earth's Flu? Thats great until the Martians invade us, now there will be nothing to stop them...
"The chances of anything coming from Mars was a million to one, but still they come"
Your assertion that vaccines would create super bugs has historically been proven false. Those outbreaks were in places where vaccination rates and standards of care are low, and there is no evidence that they were caused by your hypothetical "unvaccinable" bugs (also: currently no usable vaccine for Yersinia pestis). Moreover, why should the prospect of eventually creating resistance deter us from preventing or curing disease? There is no inherent reason why this should be true. With antibiotics, your option is to create resistance and save lives, or to not use antibiotics and have people die. Obviously it's not exactly that simple (option 3: use antibiotics responsibly and avoid selecting for resistance), but my point still stands. In conclusion: vaccines have not been shown to create super bugs, nor is obvious why this should be a deterrent to their use.
While I would certainly love to believe that story, I know too many studies that could not be replicated. And this study hasn't even been published. Since it will be published next month, it has hopefully at least passed peer-review. Well, I really hope this isn't just hot air... For a good text about study quality please read e.g. here: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
See: MRSA
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
Notice that this comes from univeristy research, not big pharma. This highlights the flawed model of making vaccines and medicine profit based. While that works fine for symptom treatment, there is just no profit motive for curing disease or creating a 1 time vaccine. We need a new model to encourage cures over treatment.
HISTORICAL FACTS EXPOSING THE DANGERS AND INEFFECTIVENESS OF VACCINES
- In 1871-2, England, with 98% of the population aged between 2 and 50 vaccinated against smallpox, it experienced its worst ever smallpox outbreak with 45,000 deaths. During the same period in Germany, with a vaccination rate of 96%, there were over 125,000 deaths from smallpox. (The Hadwen Documents)
- In Germany, compulsory mass vaccination against diphtheria commenced in 1940 and by 1945 diphtheria cases were up from 40,000 to 250,000. (Don't Get Stuck, Hannah Allen)
- In the USA in 1960, two virologists discovered that both polio vaccines were contaminated with the SV 40 virus which causes cancer in animals as well as changes in human cell tissue cultures. Millions of children had been injected with these vaccines. (Med Jnl of Australia 17/3/1973 p555)
- In 1967, Ghana was declared measles free by the World Health Organisation after 96% of its population was vaccinated. In 1972, Ghana experienced one of its worst measles outbreaks with its highest ever mortality rate. (Dr H Albonico, MMR Vaccine Campaign in Switzerland, March 1990)
- In the UK between 1970 and 1990, over 200,000 cases of whooping cough occurred in fully vaccinated children. (Community Disease Surveillance Centre, UK)
- In the 1970's a tuberculosis vaccine trial in India involving 260,000 people revealed that more cases of TB occurred in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. (The Lancet 12/1/80 p73)
- In 1977, Dr Jonas Salk who developed the first polio vaccine, testified along with other scientists, that mass inoculation against polio was the cause of most polio cases throughout the USA since 1961. (Science 4/4/77 "Abstracts" )
- In 1978, a survey of 30 States in the US revealed that more than half of the children who contracted measles had been adequately vaccinated. (The People's Doctor, Dr R Mendelsohn)
- In 1979, Sweden abandoned the whooping cough vaccine due to its ineffectiveness. Out of 5,140 cases in 1978, it was found that 84% had been vaccinated three times! (BMJ 283:696-697, 1981)
-The February 1981 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 90% of obstetricians and 66% of pediatricians refused to take the rubella vaccine.
- In the USA, the cost of a single DPT shot had risen from 11 cents in 1982 to $11.40 in 1987. The manufacturers of the vaccine were putting aside $8 per shot to cover legal costs and damages they were paying out to parents of brain damaged children and children who died after vaccination. (The Vine, Issue 7, January 1994, Nambour, Qld)
- In Oman between 1988 and 1989, a polio outbreak occurred amongst thousands of fully vaccinated children. The region with the highest attack rate had the highest vaccine coverage. The region with the lowest attack rate had the lowest vaccine coverage. (The Lancet, 21/9/91)
- In 1990, a UK survey involving 598 doctors revealed that over 50% of them refused to have the Hepatitis B vaccine despite belonging to the high risk group urged to be vaccinated. (British Med Jnl, 27/1/1990)
- In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association had an article on measles which stated " Although more than 95% of school-aged children in the US are vaccinated against measles, large measles outbreaks continue to occur in schools and most cases in this setting occur among previously vaccinated children." (JAMA, 21/11/90)
- In the USA, from July 1990 to November 1993, the US Food and Drug Administration counted a total of 54,072 adverse reactions following vaccination. The FDA admitted that this number represented only 10% of the real total, because most doctors were refusing to report vaccine injuries. In other words, adverse reactions for this period exceeded half a million! (National Vaccine Information Centre, March 2, 1994)
- In the New England Journal of Medicine July 1994 issue a study found that over 80% of children under 5 years of age who had contracted whooping cough had been fully vaccinated.
*** must be covered by universal health care....
Joe Investor
Yes, be alarmist about something you are woefully ignorant on.
vaccines that aren't 'live' don't cause mutations.
Vaccinations and antibiotic regimes work differently.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I also confess to being totally ignorant about how the immune system works, or why vaccines would be different from penicillin. I've never heard ANY evidence at all suggesting that over-vaccination has created super-bugs. For the record, I literally know next to nothing about this topic. I'm not trying to insinuate FUD against vaccines (or AZT). If VortexCortex and I are concerned for nothing, then great! Anyway, there were some interesting comments (that were reassuring), and I enjoyed reading them. (Keep them coming.)
The article says that the new vaccine could eliminate the annual 'flu jab'. That's billions of $$ lost to the vaccine companies if that happens. True, a universal flu vaccine is the 'holy grail' of the CDC, but money talks, and somehow it just won't happen.....