The transformative power of vaccines

In several writings I will use as a reference the publications of the Institution from Cheers Barcelona World Conference (October 31, 2024) to disseminate important information about the vaccines.

In these times it is hard to understand that people died in waves centuries ago epidemics of all kinds. In the middle of the 18th century there was a British ambassador Edward Wortley and his wife Marydamaged by the smallpoxthey reached the city of Istanbul.

The variability

Marya very intelligent woman, she saw how the Ottoman women took some of the material from the pustules smallpox of sick people and they introduced it to healthy people, and if they got sick, very few died.

This method is called variability It was known in Asia. Back to England, Mary She became a strong defender of this practice and immediately met the opposition of the doctors of the time.

50 years later, Dr. Edward Jenner applied the same principle, but with a less aggressive virus, viz smallpox of the cows, because he noticed that they were milking with hunger smallpox in his hand they did not get sick.

He injected some of the material from a woman’s pustules into her gardener’s son, who did not get sick. smallpox. This is how the the first “vaccine” in the world.

• Why do you need to block an infectious agent to avoid infection? Our system protective coordinating millions of cells to protect ourselves from foreign agents without attacking our own cells. When bacteria or virus enter our body, the system protective activating T cells capable of recognizing these foreign agents. These T cells direct the production of antibodies by B cells that are able to recognize the pathogen and activate other T cells that are able to recognize the invader, even if it is hidden in a cell. T and B cells do not limit themselves to killing infectious agents, but produce memory to attack again if these pathogens attack us again.
• If the immune system protects us, then why do we need vaccines? To increase the speed of execution of our work system protective that, in certain situations: newborns, the elderly, HIV, transplants and other situations, it takes time to activate and, in the meantime, we can get sick and die.
• For this we have three types of vaccines: 1. Those with intact or fragmented inactive or weakened pathogens. 2. Vaccines adjuvants, which contain some substance that increases the immune function. 3. Vaccines is not required inoculate no whole or fragmented, weakened or inactivated virus or other pathogen; is the vaccines It is Messenger RNA, that they only have to carry the instructions to our body so that it is responsible for making the specific antibody for that disease. A milestone in scientific research.
• How long do vaccines last? Both the vaccines how diseases cause a immunity and immunological memory. With a very important difference: that the vaccines They do it without the risk that we might get sick or die. The goal is “global vaccination.”