Would You Take A Vaccine for Bird Flu or AIDS?

[KeJia Sista]

I recently read that they have developed a bird flu vaccine. Would you take it? Would you take an AIDS vaccine if one was available?

Ke Jia

[Infectious]

I recently read that they have developed a bird flu vaccine. Would you take it? Would you take an AIDS vaccine if one was available?

Ke Jia

How do you get an AIDs vaccine? The virus mutates too fast for a vaccine to be developed.

[awong]

i'd wait and see from others who got the vaccine first

[vsoy]

I would take the flu vaccine. I have no interest in ever getting the flu and the world is long overdue for a flu pandemic. The flu virus rapidly mutates and so the vaccine you got last year may not give you protection against this year's strain of virus.

Mutations can arise from mistakes in copying the viral template but also recombination from other animal influenza stains. Farmers and people who raise chickens, ducks, pigs, horses, etc are exposed to bird/animal influenza strains. They go home and give it to their families, friends, business partners. Business partners travel to other parts of the world and spread it to their families, etc etc. Recombination events between human and animal/avian genomes results in chimera influenza virus that human species have never been exposed before.

Your body can defend itself from germs that it has "seen" before. But if it has never "seen" a new chimera virus, then it has a hard time fighting it off. Now, this doesn't mean you're going to die, just very sick most of the time. However, when certain recominations with animal and particularly virulent human strains get mixed up, that's when you got to worry. Most duck or pig influenza viruses are not going to kill you because these viruses have evolve to attack duck or pig specificallly and their effect on humans is not as efficient. But the right combination with nasty human influenza strains can kill you or get you really, really sick.

The truth is, the flu vaccine you get from your doctor's office or drugstore contains a cocktail of killed virus grown in chicken eggs. These viruses cocktails are formulated each year by influenza experts who track outbreaks around the world and figure out what strains are floating out there in the real world. Some of these viruses have components that originally derived from avian and animal influenza viruses. So if you have gotten a flu shot before, you may have been exposed to a flu vaccine that had avian components.

My feeling is, the more strains you are exposed to, the better prepared your body is to fight off a new flu bug. However, if you are allergic to eggs, do not take the vaccine made in eggs. There are other types of vaccines, such as the cold-killed or attenuated virus vaccines and the mists, but in my opinion, your body makes a much better immune response against real viral strains that are out there and the risks of cold killed are just too risky for some populations. Gimme the dead stuff!

With any vaccine, there are risks. Some people may develop neurological problems but they are rare and the benefit of the whole population overall not getting sick and spreading to everybody else greatly outweighs the risk. So it's up to you, if you don't want to get sick, get the shot.

AIDS vaccine I probably would not take because I don't engage in activities or a job that exposes me to the AIDS virus. If I did AIDS research, I'd probably get it., but these labs have the cocktail inhibitors right there by the first aid kit in case you get exposed, in addition to regular testing.