Old St. Prick might not be popular, but people will thank him soon enough for the winter season flu vaccines. :3

pfff flu vaccines are for wussies

So what do leave him, if not milk and cookies?

throat cultures.

Now that's a scientific Saint!

trufax!

And a three-level pun!

What happens if you have an allergic reaction to his shot?

you've been naughty then, clearly.

pff just as bad as any given american christian moron
I CANT VACCINATE MY BABY AGAINST ANYTHING, THE GOVERNMENT IS TRYING TO POISON MY BABY AND VACCINATIONS CAUSE RETARDATION AND AUTISM

there's a lot of that behavior from both camps. let us not forget michael bachmann's "facts" about vaccines.

i've met a few. i think the intelligent conservatives do the same thing the intelligent liberals do...hide in shame of the rest of their party.

god knows i do.

I thought that was Nigeria. well, it's happened in Nigeria too, and has spread from there, though iirc they're vaccinating again. The real weird stumbling block in polio eradication is northern India. there are some areas where everyone has been vaccinated multiple times yet they're still getting infected.

ps: if you like viruses I highly recommend http://www.twiv.tv/

really :o i thought india had a high polio rate because of just over population meaning people just get infected by varying strains over and over. but admitably i didn't read too far into it. i just got really scared of not knowing how polio worked one day and went and read the wiki.

and then was more scared.

there are really only 3 strains of polio, and the usual vaccine covers all three. the way polio is spread does make it more tricky to get rid of in less-affluent areas. The live Sabin oral vaccine that's usually used is one potential problem, as it actually causes the recipients to shed live infective polio in their poo for a while, so in areas without good sanitation, it can be dangerous to anyone who wasn't vaccinated, or didn't get a good immune response to it. also, for every person with symptoms of polio, there are usually 99 who are asymptomatically infected. so unlike smallpox, there can be little outbreaks all over the place, and unless someone gets the paralytic form, they don't even know.

I just did a little googling, and apparently there's only been 1 case of symptomatic polio in india this year, so that's good, and I hope it keeps going so well. http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-.....e1-774485.aspx

or the vaccine cold chain is breaking down and it's not as potent as it should be, or the coverage isn't complete and people are missing doses, or they're only getting a good response to one or two serotypes and still vulnerable to the third... there are a lot of reasons it could be happening.

it is probably not mutation. polio has no non-primate reservoir hosts, so it can only infect and mutate in the humans that are susceptible. if they are susceptible, they're not putting vaccine-related pressure on the virus to mutate. In addition, the polio vaccine used in india is a live attenuated virus, it actually does infect the intestines, but it's not strong enough to infect the relatively hardy nerve tissue, which is where the paralysis comes from. so it's an almost-natural infection pattern, with the whole virus. so much like you hardly ever get mono twice, you probably won't get polio if you had a good response to the vaccine-infection.

The flu isn't a terribly good comparison in terms of a virus mutating around a vaccine. Polio is a very very small, simple virus, there's not a lot of room for it to mutate without crippling itself, and the only mutations that would matter in getting past the immune system would be to the capsid. flu on the other hand is a medium-sized virus with a longer genome, plus it's kind of known to be a sloppy replicator. then you also have the fact that flu contains several separate pieces of DNA, making reassortment (mixing of 2 separate strains, like what happened with H1Na a few years ago)
possible. The only thing the immune system sees are the capsid proteins, which change with genetic drift over time. the change has nothing to do with the vaccine, but with the natural immunity people get to a strain once they're infected with it. as the pool of susceptible people shrinks for a given strain, slightly mutant strains will become more successful. and the main thing the immune system responds to with flu are a couple of big proteins on the capsid that can be changed easily. polio doesn't have those, if the capsid proteins on polio change enough that the immune system doesn't recognize it, it also weakens the virus and makes the worst form of the disease less likely.

I did look it up, and they've apparently recently switched to a stronger vaccine that only covers the 2 strains they've been finding in the area, and there's been a sharp decrease in india this year. so that's good news.

dear st. prick, I would like vaccinia for x-mas. I promise to share with my husband (not that he's really got a choice since I have skin problems and thus a high probability of transmission to close contacts.) If you are feeling generous I would also like the Hep B series, rabies, pertussis (since they only had DT not DPT when I last got a booster) and gardasil since they say I'm too old for that one.

(side note: they are working on a universal flu vaccine, yay! and they've had a 50% success rate for 1 year with an experimental malaria vaccine. more-yay! and the last HIV vaccine trial I heard about was also promising!)

I <3 vaccines

I'm gonna fave this here too for the same reason as before!