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Scientists Move Closer To a Universal Flu Vaccine
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Vaccines for most diseases typically work for years or decades but with the flu, next fall it will be time to get another dose. Now Carl Zimmer writes that a flurry of recent studies on the virus has brought some hope for a change as flu experts foresee a time when seasonal flu shots are a thing of the past, replaced by long-lasting vaccines. 'That's the goal: two shots when you're young, and then boosters later in life' says Dr. Gary Nabel, predicting that scientists would reach that goal before long: 'in our lifetime, for sure, unless you're 90 years old.' Today's flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance but a traditional flu vaccine can protect against only flu viruses with a matching hemagglutinin protein. If a virus evolves a different shape, the antibodies cannot latch on, and it escapes destruction. Scientists have long wondered whether they could escape this evolutionary cycle with a universal flu vaccine that would to attack a part of the virus that changes little from year to year so now researchers are focusing on target antigens which are highly conserved between different influenza A virus subtypes. 'Universal vaccination with universal vaccines would put an end to the threat of global disaster that pandemic influenza can cause,' says Dr. Sara Gilbert."
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
Probably not inconceivable; but there are a couple of points to consider: TFA mentions targeting structures that are 'highly conserved' between different virus subtypes. Typically(and I am not a molecular biologist, so feel free to cringe and/or correct me) the fact that a structure is 'highly conserved' between genetically distinct populations means that it is extremely important for some reason. Mutations happen(and very, very fast in influenza), so regions that aren't life-critical can diverge significantly over time. Life-critical regions, on the other hand, do experience mutations; but most of the mutants die. The degree of conservation across genetic lineages that diverged at a known period in the past can tell you a lot about how important that area is, even if you don't yet know exactly what it does.
Second, while this also doesn't preclude a really nasty bug, it is important to remember that diseases aren't little agents playing Pandemic 2 and trying for a high score. Killing your host can be a viable strategy, if you gain enough from doing so; but (in the very weak sense that mindless evolving virues can even have 'goals') the 'goal' isn't body count, it's survival and reproduction. Very high mortality is frequently counterproductive, because hosts die faster than the disease can spread to new ones. In broad strokes, high mortality tends to occur when a novel pathogen shows up for the first time; but ends up being selected against over time(see the classic attempt to use Myxoma virus against feral rabbits in Australia).
So could we kill off all the 'typical' flu viruses allowing the evolution of something more aggressive?
That's not how evolution works.
Under the assumption that it is possible for a flu virus to easily mutate these particular antigens which appear to highly conserved (which is not a given...no matter how many people you run over with a bus, humans are not going to evolve immunity to buses), then it does not necessarily follow that the new strain would be more aggressive. This new strain could, in fact, very well be a much milder version. If these antigens are highly conserved, it's probably a part of what makes influenza evolutionarily successful. An adaptation that allows it to replicate and spread optimally. If true, and we attack these vectors, we're essentially changing the game such that the virus is now forced to have an adaptation which would have been less successful in the wild, in an environment without the vaccine.
After all, think about it. We didn't create more aggressive strains of polio or chickenpox once we created vaccines against those viruses. Instead, we pretty much annihilated those diseases.
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Research been showing more problems than prevention from vaccines
I'm going to use my annecdotal dataset of one. Let's see, people I know who've had vaccines. Hmm... all of them. Number of those people who have had negative side-effects.... none whatsoever. So, if there are more problems than prevention from vaccines, I'm not seeing it in my little slice of the world.
In fact, given that vaccination rates run at something from 70-90% in industrialised countries and we aren't seeing 70-90% of people suffering more than they might expect from polio, measles, influenza, etc. I'd say that claiming that vaccines do more harm than good is complete bullshit.
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Yes a tiny number of people have died of vaccines. Have you any idea of how many would have died without them?
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The Seasonal Flu vaccines of today are an enormous headache for the pharma industry. Profit margins are extremely tight, they have politicians crawling up their ass constantly, and every other year during a slow news day some report decides to do an "expose`" that drives people in hordes to get vaccinated, driving up demand (but not price) and then even more politicians crawl up their asses to ask them why they aren't "doing enough" Don't get me wrong, drug companies suck... but flu vaccines are definitely not part of their evil plan. They will welcome this as much as the rest of us.
That's a crock of shit, sir. Every time you vaccinate, you challenge the immune system, and you bring it to a state of readiness for the next attack. It's only people whose immune systems are naive to the invader that actually come down with the disease. That's the whole fucking point of vaccination!
I don't care if your daughter dies. I don't care if her 90-year-old grandparents die. I do care if I come down with a case of whooping cough from a carrier like her.
Fortunately, I won't have to worry about that for another 10 years, because a lot of people have wrongly thought that pertussis was one of those diseases of the 60s/70s that had been wiped out by vaccination, and forgot that there was a booster shot available. Some antivax fucktard cow orker of mine infected three of us and knocked my team's productivity down for a month.
That makes no sense. A vaccination only makes someone's immune system work harder, earlier. It is just like "playing in the dirt", only with particularly useful dirt.
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Exactly. Look at what the pharma industry did with smallpox, polio and rinderpest. They spent millions of dollars and decades of research to come up with something which would permanently take care of these issues and look at the money which is flowing into them now that they've done so.
Just think how much more they could have made had they come up with something that needs to be administered year after year. The amounts would be staggering.
These pharma folks must be idiots to come up with a vaccine that prevents something once and for all rather than just doling out temporary fixes.
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