Tricking our immune system with vaccines

A shot that really hurt and, in the best cases, a doctor that gave you a candy. Besides this, what are vaccines?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), a vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. Let’s dig deeper to understand what that means.

The liquid that is injected in your body during the vaccination contains pathogens-specific molecules that trick our body into believing that the real pathogen is there. This way, our immune system can produce antibodies against these disease-causing microorganisms, without really having been exposed to the pathogen.

 

We can think of vaccines as ‘Wanted Posters’. These posters show the face of a criminal to inform the community that there is a dangerous person in the neighbourhood and how he/she looks. If a person that has seen the poster faces the actual criminal he/she will call the police and the threat will be stopped. However, if a person that is unaware of the poster, faces the criminal, nothing will happen: the outlaw will keep committing crimes and putting the safety of the neighbourhood at risk.

 

The same happens with vaccines: they make sure our body is aware of how a pathogen, which can be a virus or a bacterium, looks like, before they actually meet. This way when real pathogens infect our body, our immune system does not waste time in understanding what they are, and it can proceed to elimination, without us even noticing.

 

Vaccines were discovered by chance, and the first one to be discovered was a vaccine against the smallpox. During a smallpox epidemy, only milkmaids did not get sick. The reason for this was that milkmaids had previously caught the cowpox, a much less severe form of the same disease, and had form antibodies to defeat the virus. So, when they are exposed to the smallpox virus their immune system was equipped to directly destroy it. Back in the days, the fist vaccine was a preparation containing the cowpox. Now the vaccines are synthetized in laboratories and they are much safer as a result of it.

 

According to the WHO, vaccinations prevent 2 to 3 million deaths every year. Furthermore, vaccinations decrease the need for antibiotics, which are necessary to stop the disease when the symptoms manifest. Vaccines thereby decrease the incidence of the phenomenon called antibiotic-resistance, which is a huge problem (see previous post).

 

Partly due to scepticism, in the last years, the number of people getting vaccinated has fallen below the safety threshold of 95% (of the population) that is necessary to prevent spreading of pathogens.

 

I believe that vaccinations are extremely important, and I tell you why:

• Pathogens are still in the air. We may think that some diseases disappeared, but the truth is that we do not get sick only because we are vaccinated. If we stop getting vaccinations we will start catching these diseases again.
• Our community needs vaccination. A high vaccination rate of the population guarantees the safety of people that, for health issues, cannot be vaccinated.
• It is cheaper. Vaccinations cut the healthcare costs, this is not to underestimate, as the money we save in healthcare can be used for research, for instance.

 

Moreover, the WHO has pointed out that due to the reduced vaccination rate, the occurrence of measles in 2017 was 500% higher than the previous year.

With the world population increasing so massively, vaccinations become crucial to keep infectious diseases from spreading.

Mind that refusing vaccinations does not only put your life at risk, but also the lives of people around you.