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Asked by 07pearcej to Darren, Deuan, Duncan, Lori-An, Michelle on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: General.
Question: Will it ever be possible to eliminate all bad bacteria using mass vaccines.
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Darren Nesbeth answered on 18 Jun 2010:
No. But you might be able to eliminate them from your body using vaccines.
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Michelle Hudson-Shore answered on 21 Jun 2010:
It’s difficult to target all bacteria with one vaccine because each type of bacteria has evolved different defence mechanisms so the vaccine has to be specific to the bacteria. I think it’s possible to combine some vaccines but you have to be careful that the vaccines don’t interact with each other and cause problems. It’s a race to devlop vaccines and eliminate a strain of bacteria before it evolves so I’m not sure if we’d ever mangage to win them all.
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Lori-An Etherington answered on 21 Jun 2010:
A vaccine is a weakened, killed or incomplete form of a micro-organism that cannot cause disease, but causes the formation of antibodies when it is injected to patients. As a consequence, the produced antibodies will protect us against that disease. Therefore, vaccines are made to target individual bacteria or viruses – and there are a lot of them. Another problem is that small mutations in the bacteria/ virus can make them insensitive to the vaccine. Medicine has been changing so dramatically in the last century that I suppose this is perhaps possible to stop all bacteria causing illness (rather than eliminating them altogether), but not in the near future
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Deuan Jones answered on 21 Jun 2010:
I doubt it, coming up with vaccines can be a very difficult thing to do, we only really have vaccines for a fairly small number of bacteria species, and another that was previously harmless to us can always mutate to something which causes us disease.
The parasites I work on are not bacteria, but they cause disease in humans and it’s impossible to produce vaccines against them because they keep changing the proteins on their surface that vaccines would need to target. The same might be true for some bacteria.
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