Saturday, July 14, 2012

The "WAGD" headline of the day

 Chicken vaccines combine to create deadly virus

more Here.
 
The implications are frightening, since many of the vaccines we use are "attenuated", i.e. mild versions of the lethal viruses: If you give the chickens both vaccines for this infection (a form of chest cold in chickens) the viruses combine to form a lethal strain.

But of course you usually don't give two different vaccines to the same bird for the same disease, so what happened? And here is the problem:the attenuated virus spread in a normal fashion to unvaccinated birds:
Given that farmers generally do not use both vaccines on the same animal, the recombination suggests that the vaccine strain first spread to a non-vaccinated population before moving into an animal population vaccinated with a different strain.

This has implications in humans, since some vaccines (e.g. MMR, nasally given flu vaccine) are live virus vaccines...

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