But, at the end
of the day, vaccines simply save many, many lives. The efficacy of any
one vaccine will come down to the specifics of the disease and
vaccine in question, but the overall effect is undeniable. Vaccines have
all but wiped polio from the face of the Earth; they are the only thing
that kept ebola from running even more rampant than it did in the most
recent African outbreak. In the Western word, they’ve turned otherwise
common diseases like the measles into symptoms of poorly educated, and
thus poorly vaccinated, fringe communities.
Yet vaccination is a more complex topic than many people realize.
You’ll
often hear that a vaccine is just a very low dose of the disease itself
— but that’s only sometimes true. In reality, there are two basic types
of vaccine: live and dead. As the name implies, a dead vaccine is one
in which the virus particles have been broken apart in a blender — you
get an injection of viral shrapnel left over after physicians shatter
them to pieces. The proteins on the exterior of the virus can still
activate the needed antibody pathways, can still act as a false alarm
for your immune system.
Dead vaccines are not as effective as live
vaccines, but they also can’t cause disease themselves. For the vast
majority of applications in the West, dead vaccines are the preferred
option. However, when the risks for a disease are great enough, and in
particular the risk of spread of the infection is great enough, a live
vaccine becomes the most effective option. Live vaccines are literal
injections of the disease, and will always cause some predictable number
of cases on its own — but it will also prevent a much larger number of
cases, saving more lives in the aggregate than a less effective and less
toxic dead vaccine. And vaccine-induced illness is easy to catch and
treat, so those who do get the disease are less likely to suffer major
consequences.
Additionally, not all vaccines for the same disease
are created equal. Some vaccines work with helper chemicals called
adjuvants, which help to set up the immune system to respond to the
viral particles. These can make vaccines more effective or fast-acting,
or simply make a sample of viral proteins go further and vaccinate more
people. Adjuvants are often blamed for the alleged adverse health
effects of vaccines, and adjuvanted vaccines are often not approved by
health authorities in various countries.
Many
vaccines also include tertiary chemicals to assist the vaccine in other
ways; the mercury-based preservative thiomersal was one prime scapegoat
for the early anti-vaccine crowd, as it was incorrectly said to cause
autism in children.
The unquestionable efficacy of vaccines isn’t
to say that they are incapable of causing harm; anything you put in the
body can have adverse effects, especially in a small minority of people.
ExtremeTech recently reported
on a study arguing for a well supported link between an H1N1 flu
vaccine and incurable narcolepsy. The adjuvant in the vaccine seems not
to be the cause of the problem, however, as it seems that one of the
antibodies stimulated by the vaccine may be mistakenly attacking a
portion of the brain related to sleep control.
There
are also often legitimate concerns about individual vaccines — that
they might cause unnecessary or unacceptable negative side-effects, or
address a disease too uncommon to justify the expense. However, the
overall effectiveness of vaccination is undeniable. The big
technological problems for vaccination around the world, especially in
poor areas with sporadic access to power and refrigeration, are
practical ones: how do we keep vaccines viable in the African sun, long
enough to distribute to potentially millions of people?
The answer
lies in both technology and social work. Bill Gates’ charitable
foundation has helped pioneer advanced coolers to keep vaccines viable
even in areas with no electricity. It’s partly about things like that,
but also about education campaigns. The recent spread of Ebola, and the
continuing existence of polio, are both due mostly to either lack of
urgency to get vaccinated or an active resistance to the practice. With a
willingness to accept modern science in the form of newer and better
vaccines, some of the oldest and most deadly diseases could be tackled
quite effectively.
And for those in the developed world, there’s
just no reason to reject one of the core technologies that has allowed
our societies to progress as far as they have.
12/13/2015
What are vaccines and how do they work?
Vaccines
are unnecessarily political. There is, first, the targeted campaign of
misinformation that leads many to avoid vaccines for their children, and
has created a very real scare among well-meaning but misguided parents.
At the same time, vaccines are preventative medicine, meaning that you
are by definition giving it to people who do not yet have the disease.
This will immediately arouse suspicion among fiscal conservatives who
don’t want to waste finite funding on unnecessary procedures, and of the
social conservatives who don’t like the sanitation of
potentially disease-spreading activities like sex.
Most
people know that vaccines work by stimulating the natural immune
response, priming the body to defend itself against a particular
invader. It does this by stimulating the release of antibodies, specific
defense molecules used to tag and destroy invaders; the body has too
many specific antibodies to be making large quantities of all of them
all the time, and so it only starts producing most antibodies when it
detects the need for any particular one. By then, though, it’s sometimes
too late to stop the spread of the infection — and so, with vaccines,
we can provide a false alarm that makes sure the body will be ready when
and if the real invasion comes.
Getting people to have their kids vaccinated has been one of the primary global health challenges of the last several decades.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s research suggesting a link between childhood vaccines and autism has been roundly discredited.
Vaccination can be fun!
Bill Gates’ charitable foundation has helped pioneer advanced coolers to keep vaccines viable even in areas with no electricity.
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