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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!
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
Does it ever! Not only does it cause autism, it will cause all children under 16 years of age to mutate into cannibalistic 30-feet-tall ivory-skinned humanoids with six fingers and large feathery wings! Buy a batch now - our special Rapture(TM) offering lasts only until the breaking of the Seventh Seal or the destruction of our facilities and board members by fire and brimstone, whichever comes first!
Emotions! In your brain!
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.
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.
Shrinkage and uncontrollable flatulence.
Well, it's as realistic as it causing autism or metal toxicity via thermasol.
Scleroderma?
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.
Of course it does! All those dirty vaccines have mercury in them, and mercury causes autism! That doctor in the UK said so!
Oh, wait, you mean he completely cooked that study for his own gain? Well, mercury still causes autism! I'm not sure why, but I'm sure it does!
Oh, wait, you mean thimerosal was pulled from just about all childhood vaccines ten years ago and they no longer have any mercury in them? Well, they still cause autism! I don't know why, but I'm sure they do!
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.
Well, I am by no means an expert on this stuff, but I think the idea is to make what's called a protein subunit vaccine. They take a key protein from the disease and implant it in some other virus. Your body attacks that virus and develops an immune response to the targeted protein. It's being used in experimental vaccines for AIDS and, apparently, Influenza. However, I don't know if there are any cases of it being done successfully on a large scale.
If it works out, it would be fantastic - effective vaccination for two of the worlds biggest killers, which could potentially save millions of lives per year. However, first they need to get it working, and then they need to find a way to make it cheap enough to use in the third world, since that's where most of the deaths occur. It might help that a universal flu vaccine would be very popular in the first world, and could provide them with the money to ramp production.
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.
OK, I'll bite - Scleroderma is seemingly genetic, so ... ?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
it will cause all children under 16 years of age to mutate into cannibalistic 30-feet-tall ivory-skinned humanoids with six fingers and large feathery wings!
But look on the bright side, if you are able to survive the zombie apocalypse for a couple of years until these people come of age you will finally able to get authentic barely legal giantess porn with a bestiality twist thrown in!
Monstar L
I love that there's this kind of development in vaccination, but I'm concerned.
Call me callous and cold, but overpopulation is already a major issue in many parts of the world (India, China, etc)
I wonder if it's such a good idea to simply "wipe out" the world's two biggest killers.
We would rather cling to the planet until we kill it than let ourselves decline. Nothing else does this to its environment, except ironically, diseases. And with no method of "transmission" to another host, we're boned if we keep going the same direction we are.
Now, we're not at the point where this is a world-changing issue quite yet, but within the next hundred years, as far as we can tell, we will crash in population. We've exceeded carrying capacity. Let me clarify that I don't believe that knocking down society to become hunter gatherers is at all a good idea, but rather, we should work towards more efficient and sustainable ways to live using the technology we have.
Just a cynical thought.
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.
If you really want to be a cynical bastard, you could say it'd be great to get rid of the random killers like influenza so we can wipe out populations in a more controlled manner. War or severe economic sanctions might do the trick, for instance. Hail Malthus and all that.
I like your idea about better sustainability better.
I appreciate all the responses to my initial comment, but since I had all my shots I just can't relate...
Oddly enough, reducing mortality rates goes a long ways towards lowering population growth. People who expect their children to survive will have fewer of them and invest more resources into the ones they have.
The desperate hangers-on to the entirely discredited "vaccine" = "autism" theory recall another bizarre and desperate group I saw on a TV show the other day.
They were having a panel of "crop circle experts" discuss all the mysterious alien influences and methodology underlying a nearby crop circle flap. After a few hours, some people stand up at the back, and state that *they* made the crop circles. They also showed a video-tape of themselves making the crop circles. The crop circle experts claimed - in all seriousness - that the aliens FAKED the tape, and then brainwashed the people into claiming they were responsible.
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.
I was going to post that. Another thing which is really great for decreasing population growth is ensuring that parents don't have to be supported by their children in old age. That reduces the pressure to produce many children and as a result parents tend to have fewer children or none at all of their own choosing.
"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?
unfortunately many of the world's populations do not have the resources to be able to afford such luxuries.
I hate to be the one to bring these polarizing issues up, but it is something that will come to bite us unless we work for efficient technology and _actual_ global prosperity so that most of the world can live like the western world does, able to choose if they want children, often stopping at two or three.
I don't know why I'm yelling, but I am!
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.
Actually... that may contribute to the reason the FDA will probably make the vaccine mandatory.
Adding Flu to the list of diseases humans no longer need to worry about could be quite significant.
"Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti once threatened to cause "shrinker" in his enemies.
It does seem to be genetically predisposed; however, I think it can be treated as autoimmune.
At least I did not reference the merchants' use of shrinkage meaning theft.
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?
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??
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!)
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.
you mean that guy that isn't a doctor anymore?
"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.
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
Well nothing to laugh about, actually. While many buy the no vaccine message, which i belive has it's roots in scientology. The latest news in my country is that the swineflue vaccine has been banned. And that after the latest research about it's effects. It turns out that in a country with a pouplation of 5M, half of New York. 52 out of 60 children that has gotten narkolepsia also had the vaccine. All in a short time, and everyone with sympthomes shortly after vaccination.
Those who shout vaccine cause autism etc, etc, clearly cannot be thrusted. But neither can WHO when big money is in question. The vaccines that has beed brought to market, has not been thoroughly tested. Both in the cases of birdflu and swineflue, the actions taken by individual drug companies and WHO are alarming.
Futhermore WHO is known to be money driven in many third world countries. Not thrusth worthy. The recent even'ts has likewice caused me to have a second eye on WHO, and will not follow every impulse given by them.
That said. Vaccine saves lives, but they are nothing to joke about. There was a reason to why they where hardly regulated back then, pre birdflue epoke. All vaccine have risks with them, but everyone should be much more educated of them, today you even find doctors who are undereducated about vaccine, who have little clue of the nature of vaccines, even less knowledge about different types.
Personally i refraind from takeing the birdflue or swineflue vaccine, all due to how it was put to market. It was too fast, with too few studies and way too much money involved. All huge warning signs alone allready.
See: MRSA
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
There is ONE childhood vaccine outside of flu shots that still has thimerosal in the US, and that's a DTaP shot and only one of several available, and even that may not be around anymore. Furthermore, we're talking about ethylmercury, not pure mercury, and in tiny amounts. You'll get greater exposure to mercury from eating a can of tuna. Also, an element and a compound containing said element are not the same thing.
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.
We already have an ethical way of limiting population growth. Look at birth rates in developed nations and compare death rates. Notice that the latter is greater than the former. If it wasn't for immigration, our population would be shrinking, and in some countries, like Germany and Japan, the population currently is shrinking.
To reduce population growth, you need to raise standards of living, and reduce childhood mortality.
Even right now, population growth is slowing and has been for almost 50 years (current population growth is half what it was in the early 60s). Current estimates say the population will level off at about 9 billion in about 50 years and then begin to shrink.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I know of at least 3 new antibiotics currently in clinical trials and 3 more which are awaiting FDA approval in the US, but are already in use in other countries.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
My information was slightly wrong. It was 4 in trials and 2 awaiting US approval
Delafloxacin, iclaprim, and clinafloxacin are in trials.
My information on the fourth (telavancin) was out of date. It was approved by the FDA in September.
Prulifloxacin and sitafloxacin are awaiting US approval.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
> Also, an element and a compound containing said element are not the same thing.
Yeah, sometimes they're worse. Dimethyl-mercury, oy vey. Stuff will go right through latex, PVC, or neoprene, and a couple drops on your gloved hand will condemn you to months of lingering, agonizing death.
Dyolf Knip
*** must be covered by universal health care....
Joe Investor
In the long run, yeah. In the short term, it means a massive spike in population growth before people realize they don't need to squeeze out a kid every couple years like clockwork in the hopes that a few of them will survive to adulthood.
Dyolf Knip
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
Dimethylmercury != ethylmercury.
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.....