We now have the technology to develop vaccines that spread themselves

New Scientist – by Scott Nuismer and James Bull

A FAMOUS quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin is “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. The world is now discovering the cost of its pound of cure for covid-19. But what would an ounce of prevention look like?

For infectious diseases that originate in wild animals, like covid-19, SARS, MERS and Ebola, one solution is to prevent the transmission to humans in the first place. To achieve this, an important first step is to change our behaviour to reduce contact with the wildlife species that harbour such diseases.

A complementary approach is to target the infectious agents that carry these diseases by reducing their prevalence or eliminating them within wildlife populations. Although this isn’t a new idea, advances in technology mean we may have a better chance of it succeeding than ever before.

The classic example of this is rabies: we vaccinate dogs and many wild carnivores to suppress rabies in those populations and so reduce our own risk of catching it. Although these vaccination campaigns have virtually eliminated human rabies in the US and Europe, the disease still kills more than 55,000 people annually across Africa and Asia, where the cost of wildlife vaccination projects is a barrier to maintaining a sufficient level of immunity.

Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24732960-100-we-now-have-the-technology-to-develop-vaccines-that-spread-themselves/#ixzz6tRipOp8u

2 thoughts on “We now have the technology to develop vaccines that spread themselves

  1. They also have the technology to spread the manufactured virus they designed to murder you with

Join the Conversation

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


*