On the slim chance that this thread hasn’t been irreversibly hijacked already…
Can anyone recommend a good immunology 101 text or reference? I’ve never had any formal classes on the topic past whatever I learned in AP high school biology. On the other hand, in my graduate classes I’ve read a fair amount about the gory details of some of the signal transduction pathways in immune cells. Recently, I just (had someone else) generate antisera for My Favorite Protein in my thesis research. So I have a big gap between “There are lots of kinds of immune cells that kill bad things in your body!” and “T-cell receptor activation requires the CD28 co-receptor and is transduced through NF-κB, MAP kinase, and calcium signaling.”
On the slim chance that this thread hasn’t been irreversibly hijacked already…/QUOTE]
“The Straightdope - fighting ignorance since 1973”. Sorry if I don’t agree with your ideas, lazyb
If you look a little more deeply into the history of polio and its ‘eradication’, you’ll see things aren’t quite as simple as the masses are led to believe. I’ve no idea about life in 50s America, but the diet of most present-day US citizens matches most of my criteria.
Why is the West, the US in particular, plagued with so much degenerative disease - it can’t all be down to lack of exercise?
Halfway through reading The Compatibility Gene, which has chapters about this. When we learned about T and B cells in med school a number of the class refused to give blood after this, figuring it might suck out the T cells that recognized a particularly nasty disease.
The immune system does not remember anything. After one particular group of T cells is stimulated by exposure to an antigen they reproduce wildly, and it is the fact that you have millions of those cells then circulating is what allows you to fight a reinfection so successfully. As the millions diminish in number of time, your ability to contract the disease again will increase, to all appearances your body is forgetting.
Looks around I guess it’s my turn to take one for the team.
It’s not any one person’s ideas you’re disagreeing with with your anti-vaccination nonsense. It is all of science. It is all of the evidence compiled by hundreds of people working very very hard for many many years.
Look, we’ve had plenty of anti-vax preachers come through here. You’re not shocking anyone with your wildly unorthodox heresy. We’ve heard it all before, analyzed it all before, and disproved it thoroughly and clearly many many times before. If you truly must insist on going through the whole song and dance yet again, I would ask that you at least have the courtesy of starting your own thread for it, so that those who are interested in dancing may join in, and those of us who are utterly bored of the whole argument may, with ease, ignore you. Thanks.
You need to lighten up a little - and broaden your vision, even if it’s just slightly. Where’s all this ‘anti-vaccination nonsense’, where am I trying to shock with ‘unorthodox heresy’ I have been spouting, Smeghead? I think your own words suggest who is more likely to have a quasi-religious belief in one particular culture, to the exclusion of all others. Your reaction is quite remarkable.
Read a little more carefully before jumping to your conclusions. I simply questioned - and doubted - whether vaccinations were the ‘most important medical discovery’, as had another response. And dared to suggest that people in the US were eating lousy diets. But I also doubt if over $1.5 billion was handed out to crippled vax-victims for no reason. Which isn’t to say they’re not, at times, a good thing.
Well, first of all, the fact that $1.5 billion was handled out says lots about lawyers and very little about facts.
I think there is no question that vaccines are the most important medical discovery, ever. However, looking at the graphs as you suggest does indeed show that diseases were in a rapid decline BEFORE routine vaccinations and the introduction of antibiotics. Garbage collection and an effective sewer system provided the most impact on health, although they are not medical discoveries. A rising standard of living is a close third, making the impact of vaccines fourth at best.