BIO220H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Smallpox Vaccine, Hepatitis B Virus, Antigenic Variation
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BIO220H1 Full Course Notes
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Vaccination has been one of the great advances of human health: vaccines can cause evolution of the pathogen, this can have positive/negative effects, research centres are trying to manage this fact increase the positive, decrease negatives. Vaccine: vaccines are biological treatments meant to improve immune responses to future exposures to specific diseases. In the 1700"s it was common knowledge that milkmaids did not get smallpox milkmaids are maids in dairy farms that collected milk: milkmaids did get a much less virulent, though similar disease cowpox. Any consequence problems should be: even if vaccine-resistant mutant pathogens do evolve, they will do less harm than wild type pathogens. Has been highily successful in reducing childhood mortality. Take a piece of virus from the type that does produce toxins use the piece as the vaccine so the immune system is primed. Diphtheria is polymorphic as in some strains produce toxins, others don"t.
