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Chinese Scientists Are Developing A Vaccine Against Cavities (nature.com)
A vaccine against tooth decay "is urgently needed" writes Nature -- and a team of Chinese scientists is getting close. hackingbear writes:
Scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences developed low side effects and high protective efficiency using flagellin-rPAc fusion protein KFD2-rPAc, a promising vaccine candidate. In rat challenge models, KFD2-rPAc induces a robust rPAc-specific IgA response, and confers efficient prophylactic and therapeutic efficiency as does KF-rPAc, while the flagellin-specific inflammatory antibody responses are highly reduced.
I've seen this one.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If this actually kills off the bacteria causing cavities, it may also get rid of the plaque biofilms that they produce. This could be a very big deal - those biofilm plaques are also a reason for arterial plaques that cause heart disease.
It might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Dr Weston A. Price, a dentist practicing in the USA, travelled widely and examined people of nearly a dozen "native" cultures ranging from the Inuit and Native Americans to the Masai and other East African tribes, inhabitants of New Guinea and Peru, and people living in isolated parts of Switzerland and Scotland. Those peoples all ate traditional diets, of varying composition - some including grain and others not.
Very few of them had any tooth decay or gum disease, and the less grain and sweet foods they ate, the less dental harm they suffered. None of them had ever brushed their teeth, and they didn't need to - except to make their breath sweeter for the sake of others.
Immediately those same people began eating "civilized" foods - mainly white flour products and sugar - their dental health became dreadful within a few years.
https://www.westonaprice.org/h...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
A personal anecdote - but one approved and confirmed as general dentist wisdom by a friend of mine who is a dentist.
I always had problems with cavities, since my youth there never was a dentist visit where they didn't drill. About 7 years ago I drastically cut back on sugar, not because of teeth but because of other issues (now resolved).
I used to be a typical German: I could not live without a bakery. I ate loads of bread, pasta, pizza (but actually good one) - and between meals not infrequently cookies or a piece of cake. I also ate quite a lot of chocolate and other sweets, always desert. LOTS and lots of fruit (self-made fruit salad!)
Before I give you the wrong idea that I may have to mention I never had a weight issue, I was very active too..Not that you think what I'm saying only applies to obese people and so what I'm writing does not apply to others. I could easily - and I mean easily - run a half marathon (never tried more than that), just for fun.
Anyway, my health issues forced me to experiment. To cut the story short and leave out all the experiments and everything in between, without consulting any book or "nutritionist", only learning to read and listen to what my own body was telling me, I ended up eating very few "carbs" (not the chemical meaning of the word but the kinds of foods). I almost never buy anything from the bakery, except for (very good!) white bread, which lasts two weeks or so (or even more). NO chocolate, no cake, no cookies. Very few fruits, and even less of the sweet kinds of fruits. Almost never bread, almost never pasta, almost never potatoes. NO SUGAR. Again, no extremes: I'm sure one or the other salad dressing I got when I didn't eat at home had sugar. I would not even mind eating a piece of cake now and then - if only I had any appetite for that stuff. I never do, not any more.
I don't have to force myself to any of it, it comes naturally now!
On the other hand, I eat a lot less meat than in the past too. Again not because of some "nutrition advice" that I follow, I really can't!
But I could never eat something as extreme as an Atkins diet. I _do_ need carbs (that's why the white bread), just very little. I could also never go without meat, go full vegetarian. No extremes (unless "No sweets" is something you consider extreme).
What I eat a lot more of: Fat and vegetables. Fat in the form of olive oil, nuts (lots! - what is the English word for "Nussmus"??? Darn!), cream. Quite abit of dairy, but zero milk, all in the form of cheese and other kinds of milk that went through bacterial processing.
MY TEETH:
I have suddenly had ZERO problems with my teeth for years! A complete change! And I don't even need to brush my teeth. Okay, for breath :-) Not a single cavity anywhere. My dentist friend just said "Of course, if you leave out the sugar that's to be expected."
Xylitol sweetener kills h pylori, a bacteria that causes tooth decay and gastric ulcers. This has been known for a long time. Ask your toothpaste maker why they don't sweeten the product with xylitol. Note also that xylitol does not cause a big jump in blood glucose & insulin like many sweeteners. Taste is OK, better than stevia. And to top it off, you don't have to pay the premium price for a patented product.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I suppose that's OK, if you're willing to allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, but I for one, am not.
Vaccination (challenging the immune system with a substance related to the pathogen, to promote directed response, such as antibody generation) is a class of immunizations that works fine against both viruses and bacteria, and to varying degrees to other components of disease processes. Diptheriia, tetanus, and whooping cough, for example, are all bacterial diseases.
Vaccination originally meant the specific challenge of a deliberate infection with cowpox virus (ariolae vaccinae) to promote immunity to the related smallpox virus. It has since been applied to other immunizations that involve a challenge with a related substance or a component of a killed pathogen (but not the live pathogen itself - which is "innoculation"). This usage was promoted by Pasteur, in order to honor Jenner, who developed the smallpox vaccination.
Antibodies from the blood pass freely into saliva and remain active there, so an immunization against dental caries bacteria has been known to be possible for decades. But tooth decay bacteria are a problem for vaccine development.
They avoid the immune system by displaying surface proteins that are similar to those on the heart. This both reduces the immune systems willingness to attack them and leads to autoimmune attacks on the heart and circulatory system if the immune system DOES go after them. (This is why dentists may prescribe prophylactic antibiotic doses before certain procedures that are likely to result in decay bacteria being transferred to the bloodstream.)
Before molecular biology, vaccines were typically made by growing the pathogen, killing it, and producing a sterile, injectable, mixture containing its components (along with an irritant to convince the immune system there's something that needs its attention). Doing this with dental caries would lead to heart problems, so tooth decay vaccines have not been pursued until recently.
By selecting a conserved (doesn't change much because it has to be this way to work) surface component (so the bug will have trouble evolving away from susceptibility to the immunization) that does NOT look to the immune system like some part of the body, and using that as the challenge agent, it should be possible to come up with an immunization to the common tooth decay bacteria.
Which seems to be what is being done here.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I talked to a group working on a vaccine for dental caries about 15 years ago. When I asked who they were targeting, the reply was head and neck cancer patients. When you get cancer in this area and go in for radiotherapy, the salivary glands are often unintended targets of the radiation and die. This, in turn, leads to massive dental caries problems in the patients, so much so that they are sometimes advised to have their teeth pulled before therapy begins.
With the rise of highly targeted multi-beam radiotherapy, I'm not sure if the problem is still as bad as it was though. Don't smoke.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."