33 replies to this topic

[Sdescon]

Agreed that there is a huge unmet need with a lot of these viruses and that there is a huge amount of untapped potential in fighting them directly by developing vaccines or therapeutics with what we have today. Vaccines can also help against non viral disease such as bacteria (for example, the Pneumococcal vaccines) and theoretically can be made to work against certain fungal pathogens (see https://www.ncbi.nlm...les/PMC4208708/ ). I believe we are not doing enough with what we have fast enough to save a lot of people in time (same with our efforts in aging).

 

My hope is for technology to lower the cost (material, time, and societal) of these interventions. Even if it does, there are still many regulatory and political hurdles to clear - including a general lack of interest from many people to tackle the problem. My opinion - when more people care and get excited about making/watching the millionth formulaic super hero movie that no one 20 years from now will care about than they put effort in defeating aging or certain diseases, it is no surprise we are where we are as a civilization.  

[Danail Bulgaria]

If it were that easy, then almost no one would be obese or have substance abuse disorders and STDs wouldn't exist. Unfortunately it is absolutely NOT that easy. In theory, it is possible if one can control the entire population of the planet in real time to take the steps you want them to take. There are 7.8 billion individual humans in an interconnected world that is highly complex, nuanced, and full of people with different philosophies/systems/governments/resource sets/interests full of zoonotic vectors and a biosphere with very aggressive adaptive biology (such as viruses, transposons, and endogenous viral elements). In reality, as much as prevention is important, it is almost impossible to eliminate viral disease with prevention alone. Active measures must be absolutely taken along with prevention or we will never eliminate many of these viral diseases. Smallpox is a success story but it is an exception to the rule.

 

@Hip

 

Yes, there are tons of viruses out there in circulation in the population, but I have mentioned the most common ones well known to cause severe infections (hence "and others"). Cracking the problem of pathogenic viruses is a huge undertaking with multiple pathways not unlike solving aging. We must first attack the low hanging fruit of pathogenic viruses we absolutely have excellent evidence that cause human disease before moving on to those that do so more slowly or have lesser evidence. We are currently not in a post scarcity world, so resources must be used efficiently and in synergy as best as they could.

 

I don't say it is easy. Otherwise it is not impossible at all.

You don't need to control the entire crowd, you need to educate it enough to follow simple, easy rules. It is hard though. The crowd has proven itself being endlessly dumb. But that should happen. Otherwise the number of pathogens will be increasing until the human kind will totally crumble.

"it is almost impossible to eliminate viral disease with prevention alone"
Didn't you see that the only one erradicated has been with prevention?

It is not an exceptoion, but a proof, that if the crowd gets smarter, the virus can be erased from the face of earth.

[Sdescon]

I don't say it is easy. Otherwise it is not impossible at all.

You don't need to control the entire crowd, you need to educate it enough to follow simple, easy rules. It is hard though. The crowd has proven itself being endlessly dumb. But that should happen. Otherwise the number of pathogens will be increasing until the human kind will totally crumble.

"it is almost impossible to eliminate viral disease with prevention alone"
Didn't you see that the only one erradicated has been with prevention?

It is not an exceptoion, but a proof, that if the crowd gets smarter, the virus can be erased from the face of earth.

 

Smallpox is a disease that took a herculean effort across the world and many many years to eradicate. This is by no means passive or chalked up as simple prevention and it is a very unique circumstance. The first smallpox vaccine was made in 1796 by Edward Jenner (https://en.wikipedia...mallpox_vaccine ).

 

1. Not all viral infections are easy to create vaccines for like Smallpox or Polio

   a) Some viruses mutate too quickly and it is very hard to find a binding site on the virus that is highly conserved (HIV or influenza). Research is ongoing to try and make a universal pan-influenza vaccine

   b) Some viruses have many many sub types (ie the 200+ cold viruses of which most are rhinoviruses and non SARS type coronaviruses. Also there are multiple HIV-1 and 2 subtypes https://en.wikipedia...Subtypes_of_HIV ). A partial solution is to make a multi-valent vaccine which tries to cover as many important strains as possible (ie HPV 9 valent vaccines, despite there being 200+ strains of HPV, of which 40 are spread as STDs).

       It may not be feasible to always have vaccines that cover every strain (ie seasonal flu vaccines only cover a fraction of the circulating strains in any given year)

   c) Some viruses can still reinfect someone after being cured such as Hepatitis C and which fool the immune system despite mounting an antibody and T Cell response from prior infection, thus making a vaccine for these requires research as to why this happens and how a vaccine would work. Elite controllers need to be found who naturally make highly effective neutralizing antibodies, and we need to learn or apply these (whether by making an antibody drug or small molecule which targets some weakness of the virus)

   d) Viruses which quickly form latent reservoirs may fail to be vaccinated against in all populations, unless there is a quite vigorous immune response (ie EBV, Herpes, etc). Such viruses may need to have active measures such as gene therapies. An example of a technique which fights viral reservoir include experimental HDAC inhibitors which "wake up" HIV from latent cells and then a kill approach is used to destroy the reservoirs

   e) Vaccines may not be possible against endogenous viral elements or transposons (we in fact still don't know what these selfish jumping genes do and in what setting do they cause human disease). This one we still don't know much about.

 

 

2. Vaccination efforts must be sustained and require a lot of resources

   a) Wild type Polio is still not eradicated worldwide despite many many years of work across multiple countries. Vaccine derived polio is still an issue (due to the live nature of that particular vaccine).

   b) Measles made a comeback despite being controlled for a very long time due to anti-Vax sentiments in parts of the US, and this can happen with many other viral diseases. This shows that efforts can fail in the long run if there is a slack of effort to sustain the initiative

   c) Zoonotic vectors must be surveilled for and controlled. IE birds or pigs which cause a lot of crossover of influenza into the human population. Mosquitos which spread Zika and other disease are also a problem.

   d) Safe and effective vaccines take a lot of time (and money) to make. New technologies might improve the turnaround, but a new pandemic is much quicker to infect a huge chunk of population than we could ever make vaccines for. Distribution is complicated by temperature requirements, logistics, need for multiple boosters, political factors, etc

 

These are only a small taste of the challenges faced and not all encompassing by any measure. If you can devise techniques and technologies that can help, then I will root for you. We must not underestimate the task by any measure.

Edited by Sdescon, 04 September 2020 - 06:42 PM.

[Danail Bulgaria]

Smallpox is a disease that took a herculean effort across the world and many many years to eradicate. This is by no means passive or chalked up as simple prevention and it is a very unique circumstance. The first smallpox vaccine was made in 1796 by Edward Jenner (https://en.wikipedia...mallpox_vaccine ).

 

1. Not all viral infections are easy to create vaccines for like Smallpox or Polio

   a) Some viruses mutate too quickly and it is very hard to find a binding site on the virus that is highly conserved (HIV or influenza). Research is ongoing to try and make a universal pan-influenza vaccine

   b) Some viruses have many many sub types (ie the 200+ cold viruses of which most are rhinoviruses and non SARS type coronaviruses. Also there are multiple HIV-1 and 2 subtypes https://en.wikipedia...Subtypes_of_HIV ). A partial solution is to make a multi-valent vaccine which tries to cover as many important strains as possible (ie HPV 9 valent vaccines, despite there being 200+ strains of HPV, of which 40 are spread as STDs).

       It may not be feasible to always have vaccines that cover every strain (ie seasonal flu vaccines only cover a fraction of the circulating strains in any given year)

   c) Some viruses can still reinfect someone after being cured such as Hepatitis C and which fool the immune system despite mounting an antibody and T Cell response from prior infection, thus making a vaccine for these requires research as to why this happens and how a vaccine would work. Elite controllers need to be found who naturally make highly effective neutralizing antibodies, and we need to learn or apply these (whether by making an antibody drug or small molecule which targets some weakness of the virus)

   d) Viruses which quickly form latent reservoirs may fail to be vaccinated against in all populations, unless there is a quite vigorous immune response (ie EBV, Herpes, etc). Such viruses may need to have active measures such as gene therapies. An example of a technique which fights viral reservoir include experimental HDAC inhibitors which "wake up" HIV from latent cells and then a kill approach is used to destroy the reservoirs

   e) Vaccines may not be possible against endogenous viral elements or transposons (we in fact still don't know what these selfish jumping genes do and in what setting do they cause human disease). This one we still don't know much about.

 

 

2. Vaccination efforts must be sustained and require a lot of resources

   a) Wild type Polio is still not eradicated worldwide despite many many years of work across multiple countries. Vaccine derived polio is still an issue (due to the live nature of that particular vaccine).

   b) Measles made a comeback despite being controlled for a very long time due to anti-Vax sentiments in parts of the US, and this can happen with many other viral diseases. This shows that efforts can fail in the long run if there is a slack of effort to sustain the initiative

   c) Zoonotic vectors must be surveilled for and controlled. IE birds or pigs which cause a lot of crossover of influenza into the human population. Mosquitos which spread Zika and other disease are also a problem.

   d) Safe and effective vaccines take a lot of time (and money) to make. New technologies might improve the turnaround, but a new pandemic is much quicker to infect a huge chunk of population than we could ever make vaccines for. Distribution is complicated by temperature requirements, logistics, need for multiple boosters, political factors, etc

 

These are only a small taste of the challenges faced and not all encompassing by any measure. If you can devise techniques and technologies that can help, then I will root for you. We must not underestimate the task by any measure.

 

Yes, the eradication of the Smallpox took a herculean effort across the world and years, but that is because the world is crammed with idiots. Not because the viruses are impossible to iradicate.
As I told you, you don't need exactly a vaccine, but an effective prevention. By prevention don't understand something that is passive, but what is being ment in the medicine. It is not to let something to happen. Prevention sometimes is very active, such as maintaining the sterilization in a hospital. For the coronavirus pandemics - you have to stitch masks, produce desinfectants, manifacture face shields, etc. These things are at some extent active.

And people have many effective preventions for many viruses.

It is needed the crowd to become more clever, and the mankind may start eradicating them one by one, or group by group.