• Question: is their a way that we can stop all disease with one jab or one click to stop all of this in all country's

    Asked by ninjaturtle to Joe, Juan, Kate, Rory, Rosie on 12 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Rory Miles

      Rory Miles answered on 12 Mar 2014:


      It would be amazing if we were able to make this. Unfortunately, the way that vaccines (jabs) currently work mean that’s its better to give some vaccines separately (otherwise they don’t work too well). With some you also need to get the jab multiple times for it to work (for example, getting a tetanus jab every 10 years). Some jabs do work for multiple diseases, like the measles, mumps and rubella, but this might be extremely difficult to do for all diseases. Some vaccines can only work for particular types of one virus (we call these strains). The flu vaccine for example only works for the 3 strains that are predicted to be the most common each winter (the scientists who do this work are called epidemiologists). These vaccines only for microbial diseases. There is a lot of work going into producing a cancer vaccine (this is the uncontrollable growth of your own bodies cells). This would work by promoting your bodies protective response (immune response) to attack the continuously growing cells. Currently, these are not used in hospitals and can only be used against one specific cancer: there are any different types. Potentially far in the future we may think of a completely new way in which to do this, but currently diseases are too different from each other to create one jab. For good news, many scientists are still working on jabs for a lot of diseases we can’t currently vaccinate against, so more diseases will still continue to reduced.

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