Today was my annual doctor’s visit and they gave me the second part of the shingles vaccine, and I just want to take a moment and gush about how Absolutely Amazing it is to live in a time of vaccines.
Some of you might be old enough to remember the most common disease “prevention” method known to mothers everywhere … it’s “The neighbor’s kids have chicken pox, go play with them.” Why did primary caregivers make sick children play with well ones? Well, some diseases are just nasty in adults, but kinder to children. Best solution for chicken pox was get it over early.
Then there was “keep away”. Mumps, scarlet fever, polio, and other diseases causing blindness, brain damage from high fever, or crippling. Those children and adults were isolated if at all possible. One version of keep away was the “back room” where grandma or other elderly person with a communicable disease like pneumonia was isolated. The teenager, with the strongest immunity system but not yet working at high wages, would be the primary caregiver for the ill adult while the rest of the adults (and often children) remained wage-earners / food-producers.
But vaccines are so much better than these two methods, “go play” and “keep away”. And to get there, the study of immunology was needed.
Edward Jenner (1700s) noticed milk maids who had cowpox did not get smallpox, or didn’t get it as bad. The two disease were similar enough to get cross-protection. During the American Civil War, solider who caught malaria were cured of syphilis (which couldn’t handle the high fevers of malaria).
But to give people disease to cure other diseases, that doesn’t figure well into “do no harm”.
Maybe DEAD diseases could work. So inoculating with really toned down diseases and dead diseases became a thing. Introduce the immune system to the disease, get it to know that bad guy in a controlled way, then it will wallop it when the really bad guy comes knocking.
Vaccines worked – Smallpox, polio, rinderpest, tetanus, mumps, whooping cough, gone or nearly eradicated.
Babies weren’t baptized and officially named the eighth day for a reason. First, they had to live long enough to need a name. Going to older graveyards, with all the small, small plots for children is eye opening.
Recently humans have unlocked DNA, discovered in 1953 and the first virus sequenced in 1977. The first full human chromosome was sequenced in 1999 as part of the Human Genome Project, with the project amazingly finished in 2003 thanks to technology and WORLD-WIDE focus. In 2020, COVID got sequenced in a matter of weeks thanks to the previous work. Now, instead of dumping actual full viruses into people (dead or disabled), we could create things which LOOK like a virus for our immune using mRNA techniques. Things which used to take generations, controlled in a couple years.
Yeah, my muscles are sore from the flu vaccine on Tuesday and the shingles vaccine on Thursday, and I feel a little feverish. But that is just the immune system learning how to do the BEAT-DOWN on any invaders. Go to it my little warriors, practice protecting me!
Vaccines are totally worth geeking about.
UPDATE ON THE VACCINE: 11/22/22 – Wow, that second round of shingles vaccine really knocked me back a round. Two day of big fever, sore arm (with swelling at site), and exhaustion. If that is what it is like when my immune system is just prepping and sparring with a dummy, I really don’t want the real thing. I’ll need to keep in mind how wiped I was for the every-10-years to renew shingles vaccine; two days off afterwards to recover minimum.
Bibliography
History of Genomics. https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/timeline-history-of-genomics/ (Last visited 11/17/2022)