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Measles spreading in Europe

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Hayabusa Rider said:
As simple as bacteria may seem, the truth is that it's quite the reverse. They have developed over hundreds of millions of years to be environmentally adaptable and have the machinery to cope with a wide variety of substances and organisms that would otherwise eradicate them. Their adaptability, their ability to respond individually and through a rapid development by virtue of short life cycles means that it's impossible to get ahead of them. Remember the problem isn't to kill the bacteria but to do so in a way that isn't harmful to the host. I can cure you of all disease with absolutely no failure possible. I cut off your head. You see that killing off bacteria isn't entirely the thing.

The medical standard isn't effective, it's safe and effective. What is "safe"? In practice it's "safe as possible"- so administering medications to kill an infection but might harm you is sometimes necessary. As a rule it's not desireable.

Adaption speed of organisms is greater than our ability to create compounds which are vastly different in toxicity such that people are cured safely. It's likely a race we perpetually lose for the imaginable future.
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That point makes it a bit clearer. I suppose we are (were?) lucky in a way to have the antibiotics we do.

Is it possible there will be a Star Trek/SF type future where we can just engineer antibiotics as required, in a far more instrumental and directed way than we can now? (is it currently more a case of 'discovering' them than 'making' them?) Or is the potential variety limited in a more fundamental way, so that even if we had better tools for creating them in a made-to-measure fashion, we could still run out of usable ones?

Because they _are_ going to stop working eventually, it seems. It just doesn't seem possible, given politics and human nature, to prevent their ever being carelessly used somewhere in the world, hence bugs are going to slowly become resistant to the ones we currently have.
 
pmv said:
That point makes it a bit clearer. I suppose we are (were?) lucky in a way to have the antibiotics we do.

Is it possible there will be a Star Trek/SF type future where we can just engineer antibiotics as required, in a far more instrumental and directed way than we can now? (is it currently more a case of 'discovering' them than 'making' them?) Or is the potential variety limited in a more fundamental way, so that even if we had better tools for creating them in a made-to-measure fashion, we could still run out of usable ones?

Because they _are_ going to stop working eventually, it seems. It just doesn't seem possible, given politics and human nature, to prevent their ever being carelessly used somewhere in the world, hence bugs are going to slowly become resistant to the ones we currently have.
Click to expand...

We are in a bit of a jam as far as antibiotics go. Certainly improved methods of production and specificity of action so that the "bugs" are better targeted but this is a race without a finish line, at least that we know of and we certainly don't know what we don't know.

My sense of things is that compared to chemistry and physics, the state of knowledge of biology is somewhere around 1900, with Maxwell's equations and Thomson's discovery of the electron. That's not bad really, but the challenges are different. Physics in large part is a quest for the bottom of reality, with equations and a perception that there is some "simple" solution to reality.

Biology goes in the opposite direction. Knowledge brings complexity and a major problem is collating everything into a fully contextual and complete understanding which is possibly fundamentally impossible for the human brain to fully grasp. Well, we're already at that point. People in their own fields find themselves unable to keep up with everything and so that leads to focus deeper and narrower and meaningful communication outside a handful of people becomes difficult to impossible. A possible solution? A machine intelligence "smarter" than we are, and of much greater capability than currently exists. Such a device can look for correlations in incomprehensibly large data sets, sifting for new knowledge and bringing it to our attention for further examination.

Massive digression perhaps but it's all relevant is a larger sense of what answers lurk not only in future discoveries but what we already have. I should not be surprised if a cure for a major disease already exists in the knowledge, but it's in the form of many pieces in a titanic jigsaw puzzle of unknown size.

Anyway, a lot of money is being spent on the problem and cash is the paradigm under which things get done.
 
pmv said:
That point makes it a bit clearer. I suppose we are (were?) lucky in a way to have the antibiotics we do.

Is it possible there will be a Star Trek/SF type future where we can just engineer antibiotics as required, in a far more instrumental and directed way than we can now? (is it currently more a case of 'discovering' them than 'making' them?) Or is the potential variety limited in a more fundamental way, so that even if we had better tools for creating them in a made-to-measure fashion, we could still run out of usable ones?

Because they _are_ going to stop working eventually, it seems. It just doesn't seem possible, given politics and human nature, to prevent their ever being carelessly used somewhere in the world, hence bugs are going to slowly become resistant to the ones we currently have.
Click to expand...

That's why inoculation is such a brilliant strategy. It exploits nature in ways we don't even understand. Smallpox vaccination was invented before germ theory was accepted, for example. They didn't know why it worked, just that it did. Only recently has science begun to understand the chemistry of antigens, antibodies & the immune system.
 
cytg111 said:
My line of thinking is that if I can fight it off myself my immune system will be better for the experience
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I wanted to address this since it is a common misconception. This idea is just flat out wrong. Vaccines are the virus. A vaccine infects you with a either dead version of the virus or a weakened one so that your body can learn how to fight it off in a relatively risk free environment.

Think of it like learning to swim. You can either toss someone in the deep end and hope they can figure it out in time (getting the virus in the wild), or you can give them lessons in the shallow end and teach them to swim in a safe manner (a vaccine). Either way they learn the same thing, just in one case there is very little chance of them drowning before they do.

Also, your immune system does not get stronger for you being sick, it gets weaker. Fighting off a infection can take considerable resources from your body and can even sometimes permanently weaken your immune system. Even after the infection is defeated your immune system can take a long time to bounce back leaving you susceptible to other infections. When people die from the influenza it is most likely a secondary infection that kills them.

One thing people don't seem to understand is that antibodies are very specific. If your body put all it's efforts into defeating Flu A it gains no defenses against Flu B, certainly not something completely different like strep. You body learning to fight off one virus does not make it better at fighting off any other virus (in most cases) and it does not learn to fight off a virus any better by encountering it in the wild as it does from encountering it from a vaccine. In both cases your immune system got a sample of what it needs to build antibodies against.
 
SMOGZINN said:
I wanted to address this since it is a common misconception. This idea is just flat out wrong. Vaccines are the virus. A vaccine infects you with a either dead version of the virus or a weakened one so that your body can learn how to fight it off in a relatively risk free environment.

Think of it like learning to swim. You can either toss someone in the deep end and hope they can figure it out in time (getting the virus in the wild), or you can give them lessons in the shallow end and teach them to swim in a safe manner (a vaccine). Either way they learn the same thing, just in one case there is very little chance of them drowning before they do.

Also, your immune system does not get stronger for you being sick, it gets weaker. Fighting off a infection can take considerable resources from your body and can even sometimes permanently weaken your immune system. Even after the infection is defeated your immune system can take a long time to bounce back leaving you susceptible to other infections. When people die from the influenza it is most likely a secondary infection that kills them.

One thing people don't seem to understand is that antibodies are very specific. If your body put all it's efforts into defeating Flu A it gains no defenses against Flu B, certainly not something completely different like strep. You body learning to fight off one virus does not make it better at fighting off any other virus (in most cases) and it does not learn to fight off a virus any better by encountering it in the wild as it does from encountering it from a vaccine. In both cases your immune system got a sample of what it needs to build antibodies against.
Click to expand...

Vaccines trick the immune system into developing defenses against pathogens in advance of pathogens being present. when that pathogen appears, the immune system is primed to fight it.
 
SMOGZINN said:
I wanted to address this since it is a common misconception. This idea is just flat out wrong. Vaccines are the virus. A vaccine infects you with a either dead version of the virus or a weakened one so that your body can learn how to fight it off in a relatively risk free environment.

Think of it like learning to swim. You can either toss someone in the deep end and hope they can figure it out in time (getting the virus in the wild), or you can give them lessons in the shallow end and teach them to swim in a safe manner (a vaccine). Either way they learn the same thing, just in one case there is very little chance of them drowning before they do.

Also, your immune system does not get stronger for you being sick, it gets weaker. Fighting off a infection can take considerable resources from your body and can even sometimes permanently weaken your immune system. Even after the infection is defeated your immune system can take a long time to bounce back leaving you susceptible to other infections. When people die from the influenza it is most likely a secondary infection that kills them.

One thing people don't seem to understand is that antibodies are very specific. If your body put all it's efforts into defeating Flu A it gains no defenses against Flu B, certainly not something completely different like strep. You body learning to fight off one virus does not make it better at fighting off any other virus (in most cases) and it does not learn to fight off a virus any better by encountering it in the wild as it does from encountering it from a vaccine. In both cases your immune system got a sample of what it needs to build antibodies against.
Click to expand...

Aight aight, ill get it from now on!
I remember reading a piece that in part quoted something like this
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160505135032.htm
In essence, it said to battle test your immune system if you want to live longer.. Thats basicly my angle.
 
cytg111 said:
Aight aight, ill get it from now on!
I remember reading a piece that in part quoted something like this
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/05/160505135032.htm
In essence, it said to battle test your immune system if you want to live longer.. Thats basicly my angle.
Click to expand...

Another freakish coincidence.. I never never ever got the flu... before I got kids... I actually went to the doc for this, cause "the flu" was an entirely new thing to me... After blood work and the works this was the message : You immune system is 110%, healthy as a motherfucker, your problem is that you share DNA with your daughters, whatever they bring home, they bring home to you too.
So far it checks out, my daughters getting out of their teens, I dont fall the the flu no more..
 
Jhhnn said:
Vaccines trick the immune system into developing defenses against pathogens in advance of pathogens being present. when that pathogen appears, the immune system is primed to fight it.
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I was tying to show that it is not a trick, the pathogen is actually present in the vaccine. Just not in a form that is likely to hurt you (and in most cases not in a form that is capable of hurting you). Your body reacts exactly the same to the vaccine version of the pathogen as to the real thing, just in the vaccine version the pathogen does not keep spreading throughout your body.
 
SMOGZINN said:
I was tying to show that it is not a trick, the pathogen is actually present in the vaccine. Just not in a form that is likely to hurt you (and in most cases not in a form that is capable of hurting you). Your body reacts exactly the same to the vaccine version of the pathogen as to the real thing, just in the vaccine version the pathogen does not keep spreading throughout your body.
Click to expand...

That's true of live polio vaccine & perhaps some others. Smallpox vaccine contains vaccinia, a relatively benign cousin of smallpox. Most vaccines contain dead pathogens. New semi-synthetic & synthetic vaccines have already been developed & used.
 
Jhhnn said:
Fucking idiots. There's a civic duty to be vaccinated. That's not hard, is it?

People who shirk that duty get really weird about it, too, & try to defend their actions with attacks against the truth-

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Measles-outbreak-intensifies-among-haredim-570004

Measles is an eradicable disease, like smallpox & polio. It has no host other than people. Once it's gone from the wild, it's gone forever & nobody will need to be vaccinated for it.
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Jhhnn you are a scholar and a gentleman. Big ups. :thumbsup:
 
the measles issue can be traced all the way back to Andrew Wakefield and his deliberately false study that conflated the MMR vaccine with Autism.

The torch was taken up by Hollywood medical experts like Jenny McCarthy and others. Now there are 1000's of anti-vax conspiracy sites spewing false information, ie: NaturalNews.

How vaccines cause autism
 
Victorian Gray said:
Anti vaccination beliefs have been around as long as vaccination has existed.

https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/history-anti-vaccination-movements
Click to expand...


Yes, but they got a shot in the arm with the Wakefield paper!

I don't find it hard to sympathise with some of those very earliest anti-vaxxers. Was there even a germ-theory of disease back then? Did anyone really know _why_ vaccines worked?

I mean the smallpox vaccination...included scoring the flesh on a child’s arm, and inserting lymph from the blister of a person who had been vaccinated about a week earlier. Be surprising if every parent were fine with that. (Wouldn't that risk spreading other diseases, incidentally?).

No such excuse now, though.
 
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