- Joined
- Oct 9, 2019
Got a question about the flu vax thats been rolling around in my head. You have the 3 strain and 4 strain type. Why isnt there ones with more. We all hear from time to time that the vax was a miss this year or that. Is it just expense vs diminishing return or is there a medical reason not to?
It's mostly economy. Technically there could be issues with recombination the more vaccines you add but really even those could be solved given enough time and money. But that "enough" could easily rival a small country's GDP, and take over a year. I already talked about how bad antivirals get in general. Now, the latest gen of vaccines seems to solve most of this but for now they're expensive, unreliable and take even longer to make so until we have the infrastructure to do them as expected we're stuck with this. As I explained before current gen vaccines and antivirals are known to be a bit of a lost cause, much like antibiotics, but we gotta keep em going for now because there's no better alternative. Welcome to biology, it gets scary.
Not an expert, but all microbes are constantly mutating. What I think that report did was get the genome at the Washington state virus sample, compared the mutations with the original Wuhan samples and using known mutation rates, figure out when they have diverged. If I am not mistaken, similar analysis have done for figuring out the relationships between plants and animals, albeit longer, geological times, since obiviously they don't reproduce as fast (e.g. minutes vs years).
But again, not an expert, better check with @Otterly, @EmuWarsVeteran and (if he comes out of his hidy hole) @Secret Asshole .
BTW, Leafland is now asking all people coming from Iran to self-quarantine for 14 days. Because if you quarantine the virus, they win.
Fucking lol at being considered an authority. Do take my word with a grain of salt as I mentioned before I'm just a mentally challenged student. But quick summary:
EVERYTHING mutates ALL the time. DNA isn't really fully packed ever, it fluctuates between thermodynamic states. So its constantly at least slightly getting damaged.
The reason unicellular organisms "mutate faster" isn't NECESSARILY (more on that later) how many mutations they get. There's actually multiple factors here:
-Somatic mutations vs germinal mutations: pluricellular organisms reproduce via meiosis, which is carried exclusively by germinal cell. (Eggs and balls.) So if most of the body (the somatic cells) get a mutation the descendants don't inherit it. Now. There IS ways for somatic cells to wind up as germinal cells, hell we've even found mechanisms by which cells from a fetus transfer to the mother, but these are the minority, most mutations just disappear with the individual. Compared to this unicelular organisms reproduce by mitosis which everyone does. So every mutation gets passed on. You can see how ALL is more than JUST A FEW.
-cancer and aging: the reason pluricellular organisms are pluricellular is because of extracellular signaling and intracellular differenciation keeping them that way. The most likely outcome of mutations is a disruption of this process, which results in cancer, which is simply an overgrowth of cells. This is why cancer is so hard to treat, it's your own body, and so hard to prevent, as we are really just cancers chained into human form, so, really, best we can do is keep adding mechanisms to chain this form further. (Welcome to biology, it gets scary.) These mechanisms typically result in aging. This is where it comes from. So basically. Pluricellular organisms get fucked when they mutate. By comparison the only thing keeping unicellular organisms checked is natural sellection.
-the nucleus: and now for the thing that does reduce mutations. The nucleus protects the DNA. In procariotes the external membrane has to pull that duty, which it does worse, in viri its the capside which is even flimsier, and prions have nothing. So yes there are more mutations going on in viri.
-useless DNA: finally. Most of the DNA is fairly useless when it comes to actual reactions in the body. This is good for us because these areas tend to be covered in low CG repeated strains, which means they are unstable, which means thermodynamically they are unpacked more than the rest and therefore it's where the mutations happen. The reason we like that is because since these areas have little to no function these mutations can be dealt with by the molecular mechanisms in charge of maintaining DNA stable with little to no damage to the person. As you can imagine, viri, which have generally less DNA than other organisms, have less of these areas. So most mutations do something for them.
It's weird that we dont get the same type of reporting out of Italy or South Korea. Iranians in general must be in terrible health
>majority smokers
>really high pollution area
>impoverished popullation
>hatred for western medicine
>think licking shrines is a good idea
>poorly equiped hospitals
Fucking lol.
Why didn’t our government screen them, quarantine them, test them etc?
There are stories of people returning without being asked where in Italy or south Korea they travelled as of just yesterday. The cdc and government doesn’t care.
Here in spain they do the screening but they do mostly self quarantine everyone (outside of the autonomous communities that have high commerce), the reason for self quarantine as opposed to regular quarantine is simple. We still ain't got the 0 patient for 1 case, which started in mid february and every official model says this shit was here since at least mid january. Yeah quarantine is more for show than anything
Also spain update: got info from my medical union contact than gloves, masks and hand sanitizer are starting to run out. The sanitizer has been fixed with soap which makes things less efficient but what can you do. The gloves thing is being prepared to be fixed that way for cases where its not that important so long as the gloves are cleaned. As for the masks, some of the supervisors which got charges for political (*cough*nepotism*cough*) reasons have tried to push some retarded fixes but thankfully so far the unions have been surprisingly efficient at telling them to go fuck themselves and getting the alert responders involved so the ISCIII can push the protocol along. The unions are as *ejem*political as the supervisors so usually they do little but recently a major chain of nepotism got excised by anti-corruption (after europe told them to fix that shit) and I guess between that, the recent right wing takeover of the south and the fact spain doesn't take emergencies like this lightly its just combined into hey-we're-kinda-doing-it-right-land... I do find some dismay at the logistical oversight but the chinks did clean civilian masks off the shelves so I guess after imports started being reduced it was a matter of time. Still expected them to suck a lot more. We should've told chink scalpers to eat shit when we could though.