Soda vs Needle
Mood
Grateful
Who will win?
Anyone that knows me knows that I am absolutely terrified of shots. I hate getting them, I hate seeing other people getting them, I hate the sight of needles and the smell of rubbing alcohol. So when I came across this article on Yahoo I was immediately intrigued.
Imagine vaccinating a child against malaria by giving him a cola to drink! Scientists may soon create vaccines against a host of diseases that could be administered by mixing them with drinks and ordinary food.Yahoo News - Vaccine in your beer and cola!
Of course this is something that I figure probably will probably be used in third world countries and such first, where it would be needed, and that the rest of us will just have to put with the needle for quite a while longer. The process isn't even fully working yet, so I expect that maybe my kids will benefit from this in the future.
Currently, putting vaccines in food is not particularly effective because they are often destroyed in the stomach.Yahoo News - Vaccine in your beer and cola!But March's method, which uses DNA vaccine in a harmless bacterial virus "container", has been shown to be more effective in early tests.
"Once all the development and testing work has been completed, what we hope to achieve are 'vaccines in a pill', capable of cheap, local manufacture anywhere in the world, administered without the need of cold chains, needles and dedicated medical staff," he said.
Oh, sure, a pill. Well, it's better then a shot anyway. But, you really gotta love their other suggestion for imbibing vaccines...
March even suggested a particularly radical move - putting vaccines into cigarettes.Yahoo News - Vaccine in your beer and cola!"This is all theoretical at this point, but you could use all the vices people have to deliver vaccines - in a beer, in a can of Coke or even in a cigarette," he said.
Jack Winkler, director of the independent Food and Health Research organisation here, said: "This is a public health issue. It's no good fortifying aubergines because not many people eat them. When you start thinking about functional food, you have to do it with something people eat.
"The answer the Japanese came up with was to put them in soft drinks and then confectionery. This drives Western nutritionists mad - to them this is dressing up unhealthy food, trying to make it healthy."
He said people's fear of medicating food was a 20th-century attitude. The technique is simply an extension of adding vitamins to breakfast cereals.
I think it's a definite sign that I didn't even realize there was such a fear that people have moved on from that. I don't really understand what is so terrifying about it. Perhaps it's just that you don't realize you are being drugged?
Anyway, the faster and easier ways there are to spread around vaccines the faster and easier it will be to combat any diseases in third world nations, and perhaps any epidemics (or biological warfare) in first world ones.
And, of course, there's the added plus that you don't have to get a shot.
Posted by Bitsy at 02:31 PM Comments
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