So, Qaddie, I remember getting the vaccination, but I don’t have any scarring, so does that mean the vaccine was a dud, or does it have more to do with the fact that scars tend to fade rather quickly on me? (I have a scar from a 3rd degree burn I got about 2 years ago, that’s almost faded out.)
Not everyone has a strong enough reaction to cause a scar. But that doesn’t mean you weren’t protected.
he’s probably partially right. The fact that theres a whole crapload of money to be made off HAART cocktails means theres less drive to produce a vaccine. Many of my prof’s are HIV researchers and I’ll tell you that a -safe- HIV vaccine is NOT easy to make. As I said earlier, HIV is incredibly mutable.
Small pox vaccine doesn’t actually use small=pox virus. By some fluke of evolution vaccination with vaccinia virus confers very good immunity against small-pox.
Indeed - I’ve been vaccinated twice and have no tell tale scar.
Its not a true vaccine that offers immunity like the polio vaccine, it just slows the progression and makes HIV less likely to enter a cell.
Nearly any live vaccine has the possibility that it will actually infect some tiny proportion of the recipients with the actual disease.
So if the smallpox vaccine does this extremely rarely, say 1 out of a half-million doses, and we gave it to the approximate 200 million adults in the USA, we could expect about 400 people to actually come down with smallpox.
Now that might be acceptable (especially if you & your friends are not in the 400 victims). But most people would not consider this acceptable. Especially since smallpox is pretty well eradicated from the world now; but this would suddenly create 400 smallpox cases, each of whom could infect some others, etc. The chance of re-introducing smallpox into the world is a pretty serious thing to think about.
It seems that most medical authorities don’t think it’s worth the risk, regardless of the expense issues. Expecially when it isn’t clear just how effective this is, or for how long.
I think it only slows the progression. It shouldn’t prevent cellular entry in any meaninful way.
This was mentioned earlier, but it bears repeating. The smallpox vaccine is NOT made from the smallpox virus, so there is absolutely no way to come down with smallpox from receiving the vaccine.
It’s made from the vaccinia virus, a different, closely related virus that can, in rare cases, set up a nasty infection of its own (I’ve seen pictures of vaccinia infection run amok that would curl your hair), but it is NOT NOT NOT smallpox.
What the hell? What does that mean? One group got 9/10 infected and the other got 6/10? one group got 8/10 infected and the other got 2/10?
Needless to say, this experiment is nowhere near close to being statistically significant.
I took it as meaning that viral load was 4x lower in the smallpox vaccinated group.
I suppose it could also mean that it took 4x the amount of virus to infect them as well.
Now I’m curious. Born in 1970, on an Air Force base in the Con-US, and went to Turkey in '71 when my father was deployed there…
Why no vaccination for me? Was the “routine” selective?
-Butler
In that case, it seems pretty much useless. How many people contract AIDS from only a single encounter? I would guess that most people with AIDS habitually performed unprotected sex or used dirty needles so all this would do would be to delay when they got it by a few months.
Pretty sure you don’t get vaccinated until you’re 4-5. A vaccine shot at birth’d likely kill you.
Better then nothing. It could help in cases of accidental hypodermic needle stabs by nurses too. Right now I believe they undergo immediate HAART.
HAART: Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (drug cocktails)