In today’s society, vaccinations are a very important part of our regular health care routine. We begin vaccinating when a child is only two months old and they will continue to receive vaccinations throughout their life (Maldonado, 2002). The vaccinations we currently administer are not perfect. They were developed mainly using luck but we have had great success rates with them. There is still room for improvement. However normal this part of our lives seems, there are still many questions scientists have about the independent context in which they work and how to perfect vaccinations so that they are one hundred percent effective.
In the 2011 May edition of the Scientific American Journal, Alan Aderem discussed the results of the…show more content…
How does the yellow fever virus compare to HIV virus? I could understand looking at the failed form of the vaccine to modify it and inject it into animals to see the outcome that they produce but why they would look at two completely different virus’s vaccinations confuses me.
While it is still largely unknown why the HIV vaccination was a complete failure, most believe that the it was unsuccessful mostly because of the researchers’ neglect to realize that they cannot only study certain components of the immune system without looking at the system as a whole. They assumed that by learning how one strand of the virus affected our system that they could produce a dead version to inject into the body so that it could begin to produce cytotoxic T-cells so that when it would come into contact with a live form of the virus, the body would already have immunity to it (Gilbert, 2012). The problem with this assumption is that for it to work the virus must maintain the same shape and the HIV virus changes shape. During clinical trials, the researchers tested the vaccine on humans who had high rates of preexisting immunity to adenovirus 5 (Aderem, 2011). These test subjects should have been even more likely to experience successful results with the experimental treatment, however adverse effects resulted from it. The people with predisposed immunity were found to be twice as likely to
In the 2011 May edition of the Scientific American Journal, Alan Aderem discussed the results of the…show more content…
How does the yellow fever virus compare to HIV virus? I could understand looking at the failed form of the vaccine to modify it and inject it into animals to see the outcome that they produce but why they would look at two completely different virus’s vaccinations confuses me.
While it is still largely unknown why the HIV vaccination was a complete failure, most believe that the it was unsuccessful mostly because of the researchers’ neglect to realize that they cannot only study certain components of the immune system without looking at the system as a whole. They assumed that by learning how one strand of the virus affected our system that they could produce a dead version to inject into the body so that it could begin to produce cytotoxic T-cells so that when it would come into contact with a live form of the virus, the body would already have immunity to it (Gilbert, 2012). The problem with this assumption is that for it to work the virus must maintain the same shape and the HIV virus changes shape. During clinical trials, the researchers tested the vaccine on humans who had high rates of preexisting immunity to adenovirus 5 (Aderem, 2011). These test subjects should have been even more likely to experience successful results with the experimental treatment, however adverse effects resulted from it. The people with predisposed immunity were found to be twice as likely to
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