Unveiling the Power of Vaccines: Pioneering Medical Advancements That Shape Our Health

Thanks to medical advancement and sanitation, human's life expectancy has increased. You might think it is a lie but if you were born in the US in the 1900s, your life expectancy was less than 47 years and this because of infections such as pneumonia, flu, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections. Example of such medical advancement is vaccine, and we can tell that even with the covid-19 vaccine, that stopping the spread of disease was a possibility, also with medical improvements like vaccine, and antibiotics, over 70 years was added to our life expectancy.

In this post, I will be discussing vaccine, how it is made and how its functions but before doing that, let's discuss what bacteria and viruses are as we need to learn about them to understand where we are headed. They are microbes but are smaller than bacteria, even the biggest viruses are still extremely smaller than bacteria. The can be transmitted through direct contact, food, animals, and surfaces, and can cause disease in humans such as fever, chills, digestive upset, and respiratory distresses.

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Although they have their similarities, their differences are lengthy, and they include bacteria can live on their own and they can live in almost everywhere. Some are harmless, while some are harmful. If a disease causing bacteria infects us, they give off toxins as well as reproduce to make us sick. Bacteria infection can be treated with antibiotics which would either prevent the bacteria from growing or kill the bacteria.

Viruses on the other hand makes us ill by inserting their genetic material into our cells causing them to begin to burst and die, or they begin to form a malignant cell in the cell they have colonized. When a virus has taken over a host's cell, it is almost impossible to kill the virus but it is very possible to prevent such occurrence, and this is where vaccine plays a role.

Vaccines work together with our immune system, and our immune system serve as a first line of defense for our body against pathogen. An antigen is any substance that triggers the immune response, and this can be part of a virus. When bacteria enters the body, they start to multiply and start to cause disease. All immune cells start as stem cells before developing into their specific immune cells and there are lymph nodes all through the body especially near openings.

The immune system are either innate or adaptive. The adaptive immune system reacts in specific ways to pathogens while innate immune system respond the same way to all pathogens. When an unwanted intruder is encountered, Antigen presenting Cells phagocytose them and break them into pieces after which T-cells are activated and they trigger cytokines which help cells to regulate immune cells. B-cell releases antibodies to attack the pathogens but once the cells have been able to fight the pathogens, the rest are left to linger as memory cells and these memory cells will attack the same pathogen when next it invades the body before it begins to cause disease. This is usually common to virus.

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With this, let's look at Vaccines which are compounds made up of weakened or killed viruses. vaccines do not make us sick, rather they trigger immune response. Vaccines follow the words "prevention is better than cure", so they train our immune system to identify and fight a pathogen that we have not encountered before. The use of a modern vaccine would be credited to Edward Jenner in 1796 who used cowpox material to inoculate a boy with smallpox. Other people who made impact with vaccine includes Louis Pasteur, who created the vaccines for Rabies.

Creating a vaccine can cost lots of money and can reach about 10 years to get to the human use. Vaccines can be life-attenuated which are weakened viruses which reproduces in a slow way giving the immune system time to understand and fight against the weakened pathogens and creating memory cells. Certain vaccines such as the flu vaccines, Measles - Mumps - Rubella vaccine, and chicken pox vaccine are life attenuated vaccine.

Vaccines like the Polio, and Rabies vaccine are inactivated vaccines or dead vaccines which means that the pathogens have been inactivated or killed using heat or chemicals thereby preventing the pathogen from replicating but still recognizable by the antibodies in the body. With this vaccines, there are often booster shots to guarantee immunity.

Conjugate vaccines are vaccines made from part of viruses and this can be proteins from the viruses that would prompt immune response, thereby helping to prevent against viruses with such proteins.

When we are vaccinated, it can create herd immunity where almost everyone is vaccinated. With vaccine, we have been able to completely eradicate smallpox, and have almost eliminated polio.

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Post Reference

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https://www.who.int/health-topics/vaccines-and-immunization#tab=tab_1
https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination
https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/basics/types/index.html
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/vaccines-diseases.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9552389/
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1905528/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6320500/
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/prinvac.pdf