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Two separate U.S. teams have reportedly made progress on creating a universal influenza vaccine, according to the BBC:
Researchers say they are closer to developing a vaccine to give life-long protection against any type of flu, after promising trials in animals. Two separate US teams have found success with an approach that homes in on a stable part of the flu virus. That should remove the problem with current flu vaccines which must be given anew each year because they focus on the mutating part of the virus.
The proof-of-concept work is published in Science journal and Nature Medicine [both paywalled]. Studies are now needed in humans to confirm that the method will work in man.
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Progress Reported on Universal Flu Vaccines
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The Official Colorado State Vegetable is now the "state legislator".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @03:50PM
Vaccination is a successful strategy to prevent disease and mechanism of protection is understood so well that they can be rationally designed. Any medical treatment has variability in the way that it is administered and its effect on diverse groups of people with various statuses of health or history.
People should be smart enough to understand that "vaccines work" does not mean "every single vaccine, from the dawn of time, has always worked with 100% efficiency and with absolutely no side effects".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @04:35PM
I don't think there has ever been a rationally designed vaccine shown to be successful, which ones? Noone even knows where the smallpox one came from, the usual measles one was taken from a sick child and then modified in unknown ways in cell culture...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @05:51PM
Did you read TFA?
If you mean in use, then there is the recombinant canarypox vaccine for rabies. Subunit vaccines, such as HBV and HPV, are used to generate antigens that will produce neutralizing antibodies. Seasonal influenza vaccines are specifically recombined with high-yielding egg strains to maximize production while preserving HA neutralization. A VZV-vectored ebolavirus vaccine is in trials now and has demonstrated efficacy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @07:46PM
You think these flu vaccines have been shown successful? That is extremely low standards, using your standards we should believe in all sorts of paranormal crap. Make it easier for me by linking the exact papers you are referring to for one of the other cases. I do not believe any of those has really been tested, but could be wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:05PM
Why would you not believe that the currently used HBV and HPV subunit vaccines have been tested?
"2012 meta analysis found that flu shots were efficacious 67 percent of the time"
Not exactly paranormal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Medical_uses [wikipedia.org]
Ebola vaccine link:
http://www.thelancet.com/pb/assets/raw/Lancet/pdfs/S0140673615611175.pdf [thelancet.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:16PM
A quick glance at the ebola vaccine paper brings up some oddities:
So what we are seeing in figure 3A is *eligible* people in the delayed vaccination group vs *vaccinated* in the immediate vaccination group. Now look down at figure 3C which is eligible vs eligible. Why are there no cases even amongst the unvaccinated people assigned to the "immediate" group? We are talking about 1000 people here, when they were seeing infection rates of 0.5-1%, there was something else different about these two groups of people.
The other problem is that figure 2 shows 446 confirmed cases, of which 5 were later excluded because the tests were later negative. That means there can be up to 1% rate of error in diagnosis. This is of the same order of magnitude as the infection rate they observed, yet they do not take this source of error into account at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:33PM
The nesting with two ACs is getting ridiculous, but there was an error in something I wrote:
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=9169&cid=227817#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
That refers to after day 19. There are no more cases even amongst the 1000 unvaccinated people in the "immediate vaccination" group after day 19, while diagnoses continued in the case of the "delayed vaccination" group.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:43PM
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @09:54PM
Wow, just like for Zmapp these immunology researchers decided that blinding was unimportant:
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3927.html [nature.com]
WTF is going on in that area of research that they don't meet the standards of 8th grade science fairs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:08PM
Do you think the scientists told the B cells of the mice to make broadly reactive antibodies?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @10:21PM
No, they subjectively decide when the animals are killed:
http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nm.3927.html [nature.com]
You are going to snarkily argue in favor of not blinding the people who determine your primary endpoint? Also afaict the Science paper does not claim blinding either way, so it is possible they have the same problem. Medical research practices need to be cleaned up. Big Time.