- Joined
- Jan 26, 2013
- Messages
- 4,134
- Reaction score
- 2,932
- Location
- Chicago, IL
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Centrist
Also it has been well documented that our flu shots are poorly done, they often dont work very well and could work a lot better if we upgraded our practices. For example there is no reason we should be guessing a year out what strains will be most active next year, we should develop methods of manufacture that dont take so long, we should be able to make vaccines that are better suited for current conditions.
What is missing is the will to do so.
Every year we get the hard sell "Go get your flu shot, it is very important!", yet clearly it is not important enough to motivate the experts and our governments to do a better job of producing the said flu shot.
This lowers morale and discounts the experts and our governments claims.
Oh, no, there's is absolutely a desire to create a vaccine like this. There's tens of millions of dollars being pumped into the pipeline to create it. However we lack the technology to manufacturer such a shot.
To explain a bit: the flu virus looks conceptually like a hairy soccer ball. The hairs are representative of the viruses' antigens, which are surface proteins (on the cell membrane) that typically help the virus to dock on a host cell, fuse and inject the viral DNA/RNA into that host cell.
Our body fights off the virus by producing antibodies that have the ability to bind (block) to those viral antigens. However those antibody configurations are produced randomly via cellular mutations. Our vaccines work, because they (for example) contain destroyed virus cell parts that still contain the pieces of antigens ... which allows the human immune system to randomly stumble upon the right antibody configuration, but without the risk of live virus cells being in the bloodstream.
The issue is that the flu's antigens change so frequently and drastically, our ability to produce vaccines as well as the body's ability to recognize last year's crop of flu antigens is completely wasted. We've not come up with a life-long vaccine, because we first need to identify an antigen on the flu's cell membrane that does not change year to year.
Last edited: