How Vaccination works

How does a vaccine work?

Do you ever remember tasting something or smelling something that takes you back to a childhood memory?

Perhaps it was a tune you heard, and you recognise it from the past.   Well,when you were first exposed to it, your brain chose to store a memory of the taste/smell/sound.

Well it’s not just your brain that remembers stuff.   Your immune system does too.  Special White Blood Cells (leukocytes) called lymphocytes have an incredible capacity to remember chemicals that they’ve been previously exposed to.   Every living and even non living thing is made up of matter that is unique to itself.   

Think of an orange- it looks and tastes and smells like an orange.  An apple looks and tastes and smells like an apple.

To your lymphocytes, they remember how a bacteria,  virus, or parasite/fungus/allergen smell/taste.

On the surface of these organisms, proteins or sugars are present which act as a unique fingerprint called an Antigen.

Once your immune cells have been exposed to an antigen, your lymphocytes remember it for a while.

Lymphocytes that are born and mature in the bone marrow are called B Cells.   They remember the antigens and produce memory jogger chemicals called Immunoglobulins (we commonly call these Antibodies).

Now floating around your blood stream are these Antibodies, and as soon as that virus, or bacteria or threatening allergy producing thing comes into contact with your body again, your immune system can remember it; remember what a threat it was, attack the invader to protect you.

This is happening every minute of every day.  Constant surveillance and defence.  Some diseases are so dangerous (measles, Flu, polio, tetanus (the list goes on)), that it isn’t safe to allow ourselves to be exposed to it.  Your lymphocytes must have first come into contact with the disease before it can make those memory jogging Antibodies.  So vaccination is the strategy.

When vaccination occurs a tiny dead (in the case of bacteria) , attenuated (weakened) or inactive virus sample is introduced into the body, stimulating your lymphocytes to learn to recognise it, and make those memory jogging Antibodies.

Now the immune system has been exposed, so should you come into contact with the wild live/active disease, your immune system can whoop it back to primordia.

Memories fade,and so do some antibodies, which is why some diseases need booster shots to remind the immune system what to be vigilant for.

Some organisms mutate so rapidly that they change their antigen.  Kind of like getting a fake ID.  So for diseases like these (Influenza is a great example) we often need an annual immunisation.

Hope this was in some way helpful.   Get your shots!

~Rob.  #ECT4Health 

We cover this stuff in our Fevers and Sepsis sessions 

Check out the website for more details www.ect4health.com.au/whatswww.ect4health.com.au/whats

Virus- alive or not

Is this alive or not?

Coronavirus

News out this week that Australia has “grown” the nCoV virus in a lab and is now “observing the ‘live’ virus in the laboratory to see how it ‘behaves”.

The biocontainment  security facility at CSIRO in Geelong is set to offer valuable information on the Coronavirus.

I thought I’d touch on a bit of misinformation on the internet about this and other viruses.

Point - Viruses are not alive.

The term live virus is a figure of speech that indicates the virus is able to be active or functional.

It is not a living thing,nor is it dead.   It’s undead.   It is a particle of proteins (amino acids) and sugars.

Think of an egg, or a piece of chocolate; it’s not alive or dead, it just ... is.

Now stay with me,

Take a glass.   The type of glass you drink from.  Not alive or dead (because is was never first living), yet that same glass can hold water.

It functions as a tool to hold liquid.  If you think of a glass as a virus, it isn’t living, so you can’t kill it.

In biology something that is living is called ‘biotic’.   A biotic, possesses the ability to reproduce through cell division (mitosis and meiosis).  Viruses are not cells, they can’t reproduce and therefore, are not biotic (alive).   This is the fundamental reason that antibiotics have no effect on viruses.  They’d have to be biotic, for an anti-biotic to have any effect.

So how do we stop viruses?

Well, come back to the analogy of the glass.    The glass functions to hold a drink; and it does this with no need to be living; but it does need to be intact.

If we broke a glass (say, by dropping it), the glass wasn’t killed, but it broke to pieces, so it ceases to function.   Now the same principle is applied to medications that we can use for viruses.   Antivirals break the protein shell that encapsulates a virus’s genetic information.  Alternatively, some antiviral agents break the genes inside a virus.

Currently we don’t have a magic drug available to destroy (break) the novel CoV virus.  The first step in knowing how to break this virus, is to understand the mechanism this virus uses to infect, and the behaviour of these proteins that it is composed from.

Interesting times ahead.   But for now you’d be more correct to think of a virus as active or inactive, rather than live or dead.