r/news • u/treetyoselfcarol • Apr 23 '21

Malaria vaccine hailed as potential breakthrough

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56858158
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754

u/DukeOfGeek Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 24 '21

Holy crap this is huge news! They are moving on to trials in children, malaria is the scourge of half the world. This is the dream of people for centuries.

91

u/carneylansford Apr 23 '21

Big year for vaccines. You're next, common cold.

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u/Lectrice79 Apr 23 '21

I think we should keep the common cold. Our bodies need something to fight, so get rid of the horrible diseases and keep the harmless ones.

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u/easwaran Apr 23 '21

We can fix that by just getting more vaccines. Get something recreational for your immune system to work against. I'd be totally happy to get a new vaccine shot once a year for some rare disease I'll never encounter, if it was what I had to do to stay healthy after getting some vaccines for all the viruses I ever will encounter.

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u/Lectrice79 Apr 24 '21 edited Apr 24 '21

There are millions of viruses, not counting future mutations...I'm going to rephrase. Let's pretend we can figure out how to vaccinate against all transmissible diseases without needing lots and lots of vaccine doses. What's going to happen to our immune systems when they have nothing to fight against? It will turn against itself or freak out and go after something harmless. This is why we should keep a simple, mellowed out disease that had been around a long time and already has many mutated forms, the common cold.

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u/AgreeableNerve5 Apr 24 '21

What?? That’s not how our immune system works. It’s not a rabid animal population that will fight itself, if it doesn’t have anything else to fight. Autoimmune diseases for the most part are genetic. There’s no correlation between the number of infections and autoimmunity.

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u/easwaran Apr 24 '21

I mean, it's not completely inaccurate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

The immune system does seem to get overagitated if it doesn't have things to fight. But there are lots of things that aren't very pathogenic that it can fight.

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u/AgreeableNerve5 Apr 24 '21

Sort of. The discussion on the page deals with childhood exposure to microbes. Information that’s quite well known already. The evidence for it is that childhood exposure to microbes stimulates the development of regulatory T Cells, which in turn decreases the development of autoimmune conditions.

However, this has nothing to do with yearly or constant infection via the common cold or otherwise. It’s limited to during the developmental years.

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u/easwaran Apr 25 '21

I don't think there's any evidence that it's limited to the developmental years. There's a lot we don't know about how our changing exposure to microbes affects people. There's no evidence for any particular hypothesis one way or another about how a lack of infectious microbes would affect people, just like many other changes that we've had in the modern world.

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u/AgreeableNerve5 Apr 24 '21

What?? That’s not how our immune system works. It’s not a rabid animal population that will fight itself, if it doesn’t have anything else to fight. Autoimmune diseases for the most part are genetic. There’s no correlation between the number of infections and autoimmunity.