Recently I read an article about medication being delivered through a prosthetic tooth. It was a solution to what they see is a problem of people unable to take pills, or unable to take them on time. I thought this idea was pretty far out there, but this idea goes a bit more out there in the weird category.
I can see it now, kid says to mommy, "No I don’t want to go get a shot. It always hurts, please don’t make me go!" Mom Replies Back, "You will like it this time, instead of a shot you will get a new tattoo of your favorite Disney character. If the doctor does it, instead of the nurse, you might even get Sponge Bob." Now as appealing as this sounds to many people…… I really don’t see why they would want to fund this type of research.
As far as the argument goes as to why they think it needs to be looked in to. When someone gets a tattoo it invokes a response of the immune system to take action because it thinks its under attack, and for good reason, because it is. So with this response scientist are hoping to piggy back an actual attack on to the immune system by introducing a vaccination with a weakened virus of some sort.
Right now the current issue with weakened viruses that could be used for vaccinations are as follows.
- The body does not respond to the injection. It thinks nothing of it and doesn’t commence a battle to fight the weakened virus and start producing the necessary antibodies for future attacks. So this makes the vaccination useless, because its not invoking the proper response.
- The body doesn’t react in time, and the weakened virus is able to stay in the body and become stronger at its own pace. This is for only for a few viruses of course, cancer, AIDS, etc. The issue with these type of viruses is the body doesn’t recognize these as an attack until it is to late. In most cases they mask themselves, and our body thinks they are friendly.
- The body responds immediately and sees the threat, but instead of producing an antibody it sees the weakened virus and is like, "well shit that looks really nasty and could take some work to make an antibody and since it appears to be not attacking lets just flush the S.O.B. before it gets stronger." Thus the body has now saved time, and most importantly energy.
So minus my sarcastic third reason, I see why it looks like an easy answer to the issue, I really think they need to continue searching for a way to get rid of viruses.
You can read the article here, but please feel free to leave your comments.
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