• Question: Can we become or are we to dependent on vacines? If we are can the bacteria evolve to make the vacines useless?

    Asked by to Amy, Anita, Daryl, Nimesh, Sandra on 23 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Anita Thomas

      Anita Thomas answered on 23 Jun 2014:

      @scaysie, not every disease is caused by bacteria and viruses, and not every disease can be treated using vaccines. However, vaccines are very useful in helping us fight many diseases. Take common old flu. We have developed vaccines against that virus. The flu virus is very good at changing itself. We are very good at tweaking our vaccine. I’m pretty sure that the flu virus can’t change itself more than we change the vaccine – if it did it would no longer be influenza, but something else entirely new – and then we’d make another vaccine anyway!

    • Photo: Amy Monaghan

      Amy Monaghan answered on 24 Jun 2014:

      Hi Scaysie

      I don’t think we are dependent on vaccines no, I think they have helped us to combat and beat some of the worst diseases in human history (think of smallpox for example). I think vaccines are only useless when people don’t take them as they are advised, as this is unfair on people who can’t have vaccines for medical reasons and can make them really ill.

      Not all viruses and bacteria are targeted by vaccines at the moment so we have a while to go before we can prevent all infectious diseases. Also viruses such as the flu already evolve to evade vaccines but we are getting quicker at catching these evolutions, and have also started predicting them before they happen! We can now make a vaccine against a new flu virus in under a week – plenty of time to stop it spreading to thousands of people

      Amy

    • Photo: Daryl Jones

      Daryl Jones answered on 26 Jun 2014:

      Hi scaysie!

      It’s a good question!! But usually vaccines are made AFTER something evolves. For example, the common cold changes every year, so every year we have a new vaccine! We make the vaccine based on how the bacteria changes, so really even if the bacteria change and evolve so that the vaccine no longer works, we can easily make a new one to adjust to the changes!

      Hope that makes sense…and cool question!!

      🙂

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