Five Reasons You Should Get Vaccinated

From the dawn of time, the human population has periodically been decimated by outbreaks of serious disease. In the 1600s, bubonic plague was rife across Europe and millions perished from the disease. The influenza virus has also been a deadly killer over the centuries and even today, people still die from the more serious strains of the flu. But thankfully for mankind, many of the most serious diseases such as yellow fever, typhoid and diphtheria have been all but eradicated as a result of widespread vaccination programmes.

Why Bother With Vaccinations?

Even though serious diseases such as measles and mumps have mostly been vanquished in modern society, they haven't disappeared completely, which is why vaccination programmes are just as vital today as they were a few decades ago. Without protection from vaccinations, you and your family are at risk of serious disease or even death.

Vaccinations Are Safe

Millions of people are vaccinated every year and even though there are inevitably a small number of people who experience bad reactions to the vaccine, vaccinations are considered to be very safe. All vaccines have been rigorously tested and are among the safest types of medicine available today. You could opt out of a vaccination program, but the risk of suffering any side effects from the vaccine is far smaller than your risk of catching a serious disease.

Vaccines Offer Protection to the Vulnerable

All vaccine preventable diseases are serious. If a healthy adult catches a deadly strain of the influenza virus, they are likely to become extremely ill, but if a vulnerable person with a weakened immune system, a child or someone elderly catches the flu, they are far more likely to die as a result of the disease. Vaccinations offer protection to those most at risk of complications or death from serious diseases, so why die needlessly for the sake of a simple injection?

Vaccines Protect Your Family

When the main breadwinner of a family becomes seriously ill from an entirely preventable disease, it puts their family at risk. An ill person cannot work and if the disease causes life changing complications, the end result can be devastating. You might not think you are at risk of catching a disease such as tuberculosis, but these diseases are still out there and people who shun vaccinations are at risk of infection.

Preventable Disease is a Drain on Society

Treating serious diseases such as influenza, typhoid and cholera costs the economy billions every year. The direct medical costs alone are staggering, but when you take into account the indirect costs of preventable diseases such as influenza, which can cause a reasonably healthy person to be off work for up to two weeks, it is not difficult to see just how important vaccination programmes are in modern society.

Children and Vaccinations

There have been many scare stories surrounding childhood vaccinations and many parents have avoided having their child vaccinated. As a result of a lower take-up of some children's vaccination programmes, certain diseases such as measles and mumps have been making an unwanted return. Vaccine preventable childhood diseases can cause long-term and devastating health problems in children, but thanks to effective childhood vaccination programmes, horrible illness such as polio and whooping cough have all but disappeared. However, if parents decide to boycott vaccination programmes for fear of side effects, it won't be long before such diseases start to reappear once again.

Holiday Vaccinations Are Also Important

For most people heading off on their holidays, thoughts of serious illness and disease are the last thing on their mind, but holiday vaccinations are just as important as any other form of immunisation. Diseases such as hepatitis, yellow fever and diphtheria are rife in some parts of the world and if you become infected, you could end up taking home more than a sun tan.

Author: Carlo Pandian is a freelance blogger covering health, well being and medicine. He also reviews private vaccinations services at Blossoms Healthcare and loves involving doctors in Q&A sessions with online patients. When he’s not online, Carlo spend his time visiting London and the contemporary art museums in town.

Therapy for smoking kills the pleasure of nicotine

Can't kick cigarettes? A vaccine may one day help by preventing nicotine from reaching its target in the brain, according to research published this week.

Most smoking therapies do a poor job of stopping the habit 70% to 80% of smokers who use an approved drug therapy to quit relapse. Scientists say this is because the targets of existing therapies are imperfect, only slightly weakening nicotine's ability to find its target in the brain.

So some scientists have been trying a different approach creation of a vaccine. It would work like this: People would inject the vaccine like a shot, and the vaccine would create nicotine antibodies, molecules that can snatch up nicotine from the bloodstream before it reaches the brain. The vaccine could be used by smokers who want to quit or people who are worried about getting addicted to cigarettes in the future.

Researchers have tried to create vaccines in the past, but the ones they've come up with have not been particularly effective. The authors of the new study say this may be because previous vaccines just didn't create enough antibodies to get rid of all the nicotine.

The new report, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, attempts to solve this problem via gene therapy, in which a new gene is inserted into the body to do a particular job.

First the scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City put a gene that produces a nicotine antibody into mice. The gene was taken into the mice's livers, and the liver started producing the antibody. Once produced, the antibody connected with nicotine, trapping it and preventing it from making its way to the brain, where it would otherwise have caused the pleasurable, addictive effects it is so known for.

Because of this trick, the researchers say that the new vaccine should only have to be injected once, and it will work for life, continuing to produce new antibodies in the liver.

The vaccine was effective: When mice were given nicotine intravenously, ones with the vaccine had a 47-fold drop in levels of nicotine in the blood compared with ones that hadn't received the vaccine. The antibody had successfully captured the nicotine in the bloodstream before it could reach the brain.

The work is still preliminary, and the authors admit the technology is far from ready for human use; it has only been used in rodents so far. But given the results, and the continued public health effect of smoking, it may not be too long before all those boxes of Nicorette are replaced with a single trip to the doctor's office.

By Jon Bardin, Los Angeles Times