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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20 2020, @09:28PM (7 children)
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)
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)
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)
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
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
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)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 21 2020, @03:42AM
And where did you get your data on whooping cough vaccine coverage?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23406868-pertussis-resurgence-waning-immunity-and-pathogen-adaptation-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/ [nih.gov]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889930/ [nih.gov]
Your post is just stringing together a series of wild assed guesses.