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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 20 2020, @12:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoop-de-doo? dept.

Whooping cough evolving into a superbug:

Australia needs a new whooping cough vaccine to ensure our most vulnerable are protected from the emergence of superbug strains, new UNSW research has shown.

The current vaccine, widely used since 2000, targets three antigens in the bacteria of the highly contagious respiratory disease which can be fatal to infants.

All babies under six months old -- in particular, newborns not protected by maternal immunisation -- are at risk of catching the vaccine-preventable disease because they are either too young to be vaccinated or have not yet completed the three-dose primary vaccine course.

Australia's whooping cough epidemic from 2008 to 2012 saw more than 140,000 cases -- with a peak of almost 40,000 in 2011 -- and revealed the rise of evolving strains able to evade vaccine-generated immunity.

In a series of UNSW studies, with the latest published today in Vaccine, UNSW researchers took this knowledge further and showed, in a world-first discovery, that the evolving strains made additional changes to better survive in their host, regardless of that person's vaccination status. They also identified new antigens as potential vaccine targets.

First author and microbiologist Dr Laurence Luu, who led the team of researchers with Professor Ruiting Lan, said whooping cough's ability to adapt to vaccines and survival in humans might be the answer to its surprise resurgence despite Australia's high vaccination rates.

"We found the whooping cough strains were evolving to improve their survival, regardless of whether a person was vaccinated or not, by producing more nutrient-binding and transport proteins, and fewer immunogenic proteins which are not targeted by the vaccine," Dr Luu said.

[...] "Put simply, the bacteria that cause whooping cough are becoming better at hiding and better at feeding -- they're morphing into a superbug."

Dr Luu said it was therefore possible for a vaccinated person to contract whooping cough bacteria without symptoms materialising.

Journal Reference:
Laurence Don Wai Luu, Sophie Octavia, Chelsea Aitken, Ling Zhong, Mark J. Raftery, Vitali Sintchenko, Ruiting Lan. Surfaceome analysis of Australian epidemic Bordetella pertussis reveals potential vaccine antigens. Vaccine, 2020; 38 (3): 539 DOI: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2019.10.062


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @08:43PM (12 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 20 2020, @08:43PM (#945954) Journal

    It does, actually.

    The article you're citing in turn attributes that conclusion to another paper, one whose primary focus was identifying infection disease death in children under 5. It doesn't actually make a clear-cut case that pertussis cases were rising, which is odd. In fact it further muddies the issue by suggesting that in the places they conclude had large numbers of children dying from pertussis, the same countries lacked sufficient resources to do adequate medical autopsies and the causes of death had to be extrapolated from very low sample sizes, and listed cause of death such as "lung infection"

    The underlying robustness of the data isn't necessarily adequate to justify treating as a certain assumption for the introduction of your paper. But given that the public health field often has to contend with incomplete information and incorrect diagnoses as par for course, it's probably still valid to precede with researching causes.

    The lack of granularity in the underlying data, though, makes determining a genuine epidemiology impossible, and forces us to treat the disease as non-specifically endemic in some places. I'm pretty sure that's not what you wanted me to think, which was probably something silly and simplistic like vaccines not working at all.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @08:49PM (11 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @08:49PM (#945960)

    Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory disease caused by Bordetella pertussis. Despite widespread vaccination, its incidence has been rising alarmingly

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5648915/ [nih.gov]

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @08:56PM (10 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 20 2020, @08:56PM (#945965) Journal

      Did you know that even though you linked two papers, they both cite the SAME FUCKING PAPER [nih.gov] as the basis for that statement, and that paper has a methodology section and you can fucking read it(sci hub may be required)?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:03PM (9 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:03PM (#945970)

        I can't believe you are trying to argue this and lecturing others on epidemiology.

        https://www.cdc.gov/pertussis/surv-reporting/cases-by-year.html [cdc.gov]

        The only one denying a rise in cases is you, it is a totally non-controversial claim.

        • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @09:20PM (8 children)

          by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 20 2020, @09:20PM (#945981) Journal

          I... what? Did you link that thinking it would just say you're right? The 5 year trend is way way way down on that dataset, and the ten year trend is steady.

          And it's localized to the US, not not worldwide where the unclear data is.

          It certainly doesn't do anything to say the vaccine doesn't work, especially given that you can see the clear delineation of before 1948 when it was made part of the standard vaccine schedule and after. I don't understand why you're arguing beyond the desire to argue.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:28PM (7 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:28PM (#945989)

            Ok, I guess an increase from 1-2k cases per year in the 1970s to regularly over 10k cases per year isn't a rise according to you.

            • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @09:37PM (6 children)

              by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 20 2020, @09:37PM (#945999) Journal

              What's it called when you select a subset of the data arbitrarily so that you can identify a trend that suits your narrative? It's like... you're going up to some kind of berry tree, and plucking just the fruit you like. Something analogous to that.

              1. What relationship do you actually want to show?
              2. How does the whole of the data show that relationship?

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:46PM (5 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:46PM (#946007)

                Lol, ok. You are literally the only person in the world who has looked at that data and not come to the conclusion that incidence of whopping cough is rising. You disagree with 100% if published papers, the CDC, and the FDA.

                Literally the most obvious thing in the world is invisible to you because you are so blinded with... I don't know what. The profound stupidity of your stats classes?

                • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday January 20 2020, @10:23PM (4 children)

                  by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 20 2020, @10:23PM (#946029) Journal

                  Not the conclusion I actually came to, but I can appreciate how you concluded that's my intended meaning from the wording I used.

                  Let me restate my position more clearly: It's hard, given that data to make any meaningful distinctions as to the cause of apparent increases in pertussis cases, as critical supporting data, such as which particular cases are actually pertussis versus other conditions, cannot be inferred. Vector analysis is essentially impossible.

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @11:15PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @11:15PM (#946058)

                    So once again you were arguing against your own strawman. It is really difficult to communicate with someone who does this.

                  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:00AM

                    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday January 21 2020, @01:00AM (#946096)

                    That is the new A/C we seem to have picked up.

                    I'm pretty sure he's a flat-earther, although he won't actually come right out and say it, just like he's dancing around in anti-vaxx town with you.

                  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:04AM (1 child)

                    by Reziac (2489) on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:04AM (#946138) Homepage

                    What I see from that chart is a precipitous drop in cases when first generation vaccines arrived, another drop when better vaccines came along and coverage improved to near 100%, then stability until the antivax craze gave it a boost, probably directly proportional to the number of unvaccinated kids.

                    Tho it still says nothing about how much incidence may be new varieties... which are more likely to arise when the bacterium has a larger gene pool to draw from; which is to say, more unvaccinated kids incubating it.

                    We used to think lepto had mutated, explaining some of the vaccine breaks in livestock. Now we realize it's cuz there were more species of lepto than we thought, and it's more likely to jump species than we thought.

                    --
                    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.