What I wouldn’t give to have this to reduce the burden of flu season in the emergency department. In my experience my job difficulty scales to be 100x harder for 3-4 months out of the year and all...
The other scenario is at the start of winter when the usual wide range of winter bugs start to spread, "one could imagine a seasonal spray that could be administered to imprint broad immunity" against them all.
What I wouldn’t give to have this to reduce the burden of flu season in the emergency department.
In my experience my job difficulty scales to be 100x harder for 3-4 months out of the year and all of us dread that time because the pace you have to work is insane to maintain for 12 hour shifts. It doesn’t feel safe for me or my patients and having to reduce the quality of care to keep up causes moral injury to the staff.
If I could see a this in my lifetime I would be beyond happy.
Yep - as an ancillary IT visitor to pretty much every room and department in hospital buildings, there's a season of the year that I dread. At this time of year, I'm juggling project delays...
Yep - as an ancillary IT visitor to pretty much every room and department in hospital buildings, there's a season of the year that I dread. At this time of year, I'm juggling project delays because all of our cabling vendors have staff out sick, and hospital rooms are inaccessible due to 100+% occupancy.
It's not just the burden to care providers, but understand that every hospital worker, every visitor, and every vendor representative goes back into the community spreading whatever they've been exposed to. I wear an N95 mask at all times on-site (immunocompromised), and maintain a long list of vaccinations for varying vendor requirements across hospital systems and my own health. My observation is that the percentage of people who mask (including sick patients and hospital workers) has declined precipitously since 2022, and most hospitals have relaxed their vaccination requirements significantly.
Aside from malignant anti-vax sentiment, it would be so nice to have a single multivalent vaccine that doesn't require a needle, and might protect against contact pathogens like MRSA as well as respiratory ones.
I spent five years in an ED before switching to a different department in the hospital. Even at full staffing, the winter respiratory season is a volumes problem. There are only so many rooms in...
I spent five years in an ED before switching to a different department in the hospital. Even at full staffing, the winter respiratory season is a volumes problem. There are only so many rooms in which patients can be seen. If all the exam rooms are occupied, and the waiting room is still standing room only, additional staff won't do anything to alleviate that. Not to mention, a large portion of the patients will not require care that only an ED can provide. Many could have been seen at an urgent care, by their PCP, or have even self-managed symptoms at home. Prevention measures tend to go much further than staffing measures.
Plus on top of making it more likely that healthcare workers get sick patients who are there for other things may also end up catching one of those nasty respiratory viruses with everyone coughing...
Plus on top of making it more likely that healthcare workers get sick patients who are there for other things may also end up catching one of those nasty respiratory viruses with everyone coughing up a lung in the waiting room.
We try to avoid the ER as much as possible, but with my partner's medical stuff, it is inevitable that a catheter will need an emergency replacement or something else will happen. He hates going because he knows there's a chance he'll end up sicker despite everyone's best efforts. And the flu is a hospital stay for him. But even something else can lead to a pain/cough feedback loop from hell.
The culture here generally discourages one lined zingers but I’ll bite in case anyone else is curious why this isn’t the answer. Someone below already mentioned the physical limitation of the...
The culture here generally discourages one lined zingers but I’ll bite in case anyone else is curious why this isn’t the answer.
Someone below already mentioned the physical limitation of the amount of rooms, so I won’t get too far into that. We already do staff to cover all of those spaces, by the way.
So why not hire more people? That does sound like a great plan. But what do we do with those people for the rest of the months that volume is much slower? Fire them?
Sure we could hire people seasonally. In fact, that does happen every year. It’s what is known as travel nursing. They are non-benefitted employees who are willing to come work grueling conditions at a place where there is no chance for career growth, away from their home and families for the low price of double my wage. What happens when these people come is hospital acquired infections rise sharply, mortality shoots through the roof and the patient satisfaction sharply drops. It is not the flu that causes this, as evidenced by the fact that the same thing happens when they must come in on off season for union strikes. We originally just wanted to hire more people to increase safety right?
For the pandemic hospitals relied on travel nurses to cover staffing, and what happened was hospitals hemorrhaged money during the highest volume they have ever seen. I’m not talking reduced profits, not no profit, I mean literally lost millions to billions of dollars. One might think, “boo hoo ceo lost the opportunity to buy another house” but the real life implication of this is that the hospitals just get shut down. This leads to even worse access to healthcare and this is a huge problem especially in rural areas.
Then we have to think about the physical bodies to hire. There is already a nursing shortage, we do not have more people to hire. How do we fix that, should we lower the already too low bar to pass the NCLEX and become a nurse? Open more schools? The nurse teacher shortage is even larger.
How about we make nursing feel like less of a shitty job? If you got any ideas for how to fix that one, let me know. The amount of nurses who leave the career after just one year is not an insignificant number.
At this point I hope you can see this isn’t a simple thing to fix.
Not the OP, and I generally agree on the zingers respectful callout. I do think there is some truth in that zinger, though. And I think you more or less acknowledge the partial truth while also...
Not the OP, and I generally agree on the zingers respectful callout.
I do think there is some truth in that zinger, though. And I think you more or less acknowledge the partial truth while also pointing out all of its challenges!
Seeing hospitals privatized, and massively consolidated, in my lifetime and in my region ... I can't help but call out how problematic for profit medical industries can be. The profit incentive is a wonderful thing, but it can get rather ... Shall we say ... Perverse.
I'd like to live in a world where we had salutes to health care workers and public school teachers before each NFL game rather than fellating the flag and the armed services. But, our society priorities are what they are.
To me it goes back to Eisenhower:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Address "The Chance for Peace" Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53
So, yeah, that was an indictment of the military industrial complex. And I'm not laying all of it at the hands of CEOs of health care conglomerates that have consolidated the market.
But, shoot, sure would be nice if we spent a lot more money in a collected single payer system on health care! It might not be the simple solution of 'hire more people', but maybe it would be a little better.
Anyways, that's just what my lived experience makes me think about when I hear a zinger about 'hire more people!'.
I completely agree with you, I think the privatization of healthcare is a bastardization to society. I especially felt this way back when I first started in EMS working for a private ambulance...
I completely agree with you, I think the privatization of healthcare is a bastardization to society.
I especially felt this way back when I first started in EMS working for a private ambulance company working as an EMT. I could go on and on about various small things that the for-profit-company made me do that I knew was not in the best interest of the patient that killed me inside.
The way our country allocates resources aka money is despicable quite frankly. But the reason I made my point was because this resentment is turned onto me often (this may not reflect you or OP) and I take the brunt of it in person when I am one on one with the patient and I am just speaking on realistically on changes that could be more likely to happen within the current chain of command. You know, since dismantling capitalism in the medical field is unlikely to happen in my lifetime.
Good chat. Hearing you say it gets dumped onto you is not even the slightest bit surprising. Completely human nature. When you're up against the exploitation machine that's faceless and impossible...
Good chat. Hearing you say it gets dumped onto you is not even the slightest bit surprising. Completely human nature. When you're up against the exploitation machine that's faceless and impossible to change or stop? Lash out again the bag of meat in front of you that 'represents' that medical system.
In the current "real world" circumstances, your points are well made. I do believe the solutions are still simple ... but not "easy", and in fact, functionally impossible at this stage. Nutshell...
At this point I hope you can see this isn’t a simple thing to fix.
In the current "real world" circumstances, your points are well made. I do believe the solutions are still simple ... but not "easy", and in fact, functionally impossible at this stage.
Nutshell ... get money out of politics, overturn the Citizens United ruling, reinstate a 95% top-end income-tax bracket, and massively, federally subsidize the things that are actually important for a society, like ... IDK ... hospitals.
Like you said, easy stuff. Won't happen. Wayyyy too much money on the line for the status quo. The USA is old and tired. Sit down in the rocking chair and let something new come along. Maybe do a...
Like you said, easy stuff. Won't happen. Wayyyy too much money on the line for the status quo.
The USA is old and tired. Sit down in the rocking chair and let something new come along. Maybe do a bit better.
This seems a bit too good to be true. But if it does do as it claims I sure hope our medical system doesn't take advantage of this is any way instead of just bettering humanity.
This seems a bit too good to be true.
But if it does do as it claims I sure hope our medical system doesn't take advantage of this is any way instead of just bettering humanity.
This sounds really rather interesting and an approach i wouldn’t have thought of. The real science publication is here but I haven’t had a chance to go through it properly yet.
This sounds really rather interesting and an approach i wouldn’t have thought of. The real science publication is here but I haven’t had a chance to go through it properly yet.
That was my first thought as well, and it seems is a concern of the researchers as well as they move towards human trials. Still, very exciting as others have mentioned even if it's something you...
That was my first thought as well, and it seems is a concern of the researchers as well as they move towards human trials.
There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.
Still, very exciting as others have mentioned even if it's something you only take situationally (eg. winter cold season).
It's a real concern. My experience was 2 - 3 week autoimmune flare-ups after current 'flu and COVID shots, somewhat improved with biologic immunosuppressants (which also means reduced vaccine...
It's a real concern. My experience was 2 - 3 week autoimmune flare-ups after current 'flu and COVID shots, somewhat improved with biologic immunosuppressants (which also means reduced vaccine response). Anecdata from the RA boards indicate this reaction is common, but it's a population that already has autoimmunity. There's definitive research showing that vaccinations don't increase new autoimmune disease diagnoses significantly, except for rare conditions like those with adenovirus-based vaccines. Turns out that adenoviruses have a protein structure that's directly homologous with human proteins you don't want immunity against.
However, there is clear evidence that viral infections increase new autoimmune disease diagnoses, at least one virus (EBV) is a direct cause of most cases of lupus and multiple sclerosis, and the overall outcomes are much better for vaccinated people than otherwise.
In the original paper, they go into some detail which suggests that intranasal vaccines invoke a different pattern of immunity than intravenous/intramuscular vaccines, and they may be safer in general.
Even if it does end up causing other problems that make it unsuitable for the general population, I wonder if it could be useful for immunocompromised cancer patients.
Even if it does end up causing other problems that make it unsuitable for the general population, I wonder if it could be useful for immunocompromised cancer patients.
Does "amber alert" mean anything specific in Britain or are they just more likely to label yellow lights as being amber? Because it means something very specific in the US (abducted child in...
Does "amber alert" mean anything specific in Britain or are they just more likely to label yellow lights as being amber? Because it means something very specific in the US (abducted child in immediate danger) which I would not use if I were referencing the immune system.
Those in the US will likely know Amber refers to a missing child named amber. Those in the UK might simply think amber refers to the color yellow/brown, similar to the yellow color in a traffic...
Those in the US will likely know Amber refers to a missing child named amber.
Those in the UK might simply think amber refers to the color yellow/brown, similar to the yellow color in a traffic light, so one step less severe than a red alert.
It's weird cause "yellow alert" and "red alert" are relatively mainstream terms at this point. Weird to go for amber alert that has a totally different meaning.
It's weird cause "yellow alert" and "red alert" are relatively mainstream terms at this point. Weird to go for amber alert that has a totally different meaning.
You are referring to what is mainstream in the US. This article was not specifically written by an American, and it was not written specifically for an American public. @updawg was correct, the UK...
You are referring to what is mainstream in the US.
This article was not specifically written by an American, and it was not written specifically for an American public.
@updawg was correct, the UK road code calls the colors red, amber, green.
My understanding is Star Trek has become a global cultural icon, like how Doctor Who is a British show but has become well known worldwide, so people across the world have that as a part of their...
My understanding is Star Trek has become a global cultural icon, like how Doctor Who is a British show but has become well known worldwide, so people across the world have that as a part of their culture and it isn't restricted to just the UK
I think you overestimate the impact of popular memes from foreign cultures. Even the most die hard Star Trek fans in the UK still spend the majority of their lives interacting with other Brits....
I think you overestimate the impact of popular memes from foreign cultures. Even the most die hard Star Trek fans in the UK still spend the majority of their lives interacting with other Brits.
Foreign culture is extending local culture, not replacing it. Brits learned from Star Trek that Americans say "yellow alert" instead of "amber alert", but they still say "amber alert" if they talk to each other about things that have zero relation to Star Trek.
If there was a Samurai movie fad in the US, Katana sales would probably go up, but Americans would still kill each other with guns.
Amber alert was a military state of high alert in the UK up until 2006. Before 2006 the UK used the "Bikini Alert State", the US Alert State is called DEFCON.
Amber alert was a military state of high alert in the UK up until 2006. Before 2006 the UK used the "Bikini Alert State", the US Alert State is called DEFCON.
This is.... so lovely. I believe the Ministry of Defence maintained that the word “bikini” was randomly selected by a computer... as they do with all code words, to confuse the enemy. Was the...
Bikini Alert State
This is.... so lovely.
I believe the Ministry of Defence maintained that the word “bikini” was randomly selected by a computer... as they do with all code words, to confuse the enemy.
Was the bikini alert state simply too confusing to the public? Were the public having a hard time taking Bikini Alert State - Red as seriously as they should? Was it simply too whimsical for such a serious topic such as terrorism? Or did the UK Ministry of Defense get tired of all the other countries defense departments laughing out loud on the joint conference calls about terrorism threats?
Edit: I apologize for going off topic, but these are important questions.
Worth being excited about the prospect but taking news like this with many grains of salt- in understanding that the study this is referring to was in mice, and those same benefits may or may not...
Worth being excited about the prospect but taking news like this with many grains of salt- in understanding that the study this is referring to was in mice, and those same benefits may or may not translate to humans, and of course all the unknowns in regards to side-effects, downsides, etc.
Still worthwhile science being done, but this is one of those millions of times where the media makes this good work being done and runs with it for a quick headline, before anything is proven to work in humans, etc.
The article does go on to talk about it being in early stages, and being only done in mice, and so on, but the culture of bombastic media headlines running on the fumes of the "excitement of experts" I think does more harm to science communication than good
Is coffee good or bad for me this week? Did you hear about that new battery technology? etc
Very cool, very original/different approach ... however, for that very reason, I feel like this is also an approach that is rife with potential unexpected side-effects and downsides, that no one...
Very cool, very original/different approach ... however, for that very reason, I feel like this is also an approach that is rife with potential unexpected side-effects and downsides, that no one has even thought to consider yet.
Just as a lay-person, and speaking simply ... after 3 non-stop months of being on "high alert" ... might not an immune system become "tired" or "confused" about activity levels, or about what-all it's supposed to fight against?
Might cure cancer. Might cause it. I won't be first in line, at least.
ETA: Reading more than just the first 4 paragraphs now, I see a lot of my concerns are shared.
Kind of a tangent ... wasn't one of the top issues of Covid effectively caused by an over-reaction of the immune system? I remember the phrase "cytokine storm".
The biggest obvious area for concern is stuff like autoimmune disorders rather than cancers. Cytokine storms are severe, dangerous immune responses with high mortality and is sometimes caused in...
The biggest obvious area for concern is stuff like autoimmune disorders rather than cancers. Cytokine storms are severe, dangerous immune responses with high mortality and is sometimes caused in Covid (and it's a bad sign for those who get it), but their underlying cause in Covid varies, and idk how similar the observed mechanisms are to what's involved in this particular new vaccine treatment. Because viral infections themselves can trigger a lot of autoimmune stuff, once we have a better sense of the risk it'd have to be weighed against the risks of suffering the viral disease(s) the treatment protects from.
Wouldn't the immune system be at an elevated state during cold and flu season anyway? If I could get through it without my sinuses blocking up, it doesn't feel like that bad of a tradeoff.
Wouldn't the immune system be at an elevated state during cold and flu season anyway? If I could get through it without my sinuses blocking up, it doesn't feel like that bad of a tradeoff.
The immune system is at an elevated state once you're fighting an infection, but not all elevated states are alike. Very few people get the kind of serious autoimmune reaction the person I replied...
The immune system is at an elevated state once you're fighting an infection, but not all elevated states are alike. Very few people get the kind of serious autoimmune reaction the person I replied to mentioned from common winter viruses. If you don't already have an autoimmune problem, your immune system shouldn't ordinarily be elevated during cold/flu season until it actually encounters some pathogen (which seems to be why the approach here is novel), and it should dedicate its resources to fighting pathogens rather than attacking your own body.
What I wouldn’t give to have this to reduce the burden of flu season in the emergency department.
In my experience my job difficulty scales to be 100x harder for 3-4 months out of the year and all of us dread that time because the pace you have to work is insane to maintain for 12 hour shifts. It doesn’t feel safe for me or my patients and having to reduce the quality of care to keep up causes moral injury to the staff.
If I could see a this in my lifetime I would be beyond happy.
Yep - as an ancillary IT visitor to pretty much every room and department in hospital buildings, there's a season of the year that I dread. At this time of year, I'm juggling project delays because all of our cabling vendors have staff out sick, and hospital rooms are inaccessible due to 100+% occupancy.
It's not just the burden to care providers, but understand that every hospital worker, every visitor, and every vendor representative goes back into the community spreading whatever they've been exposed to. I wear an N95 mask at all times on-site (immunocompromised), and maintain a long list of vaccinations for varying vendor requirements across hospital systems and my own health. My observation is that the percentage of people who mask (including sick patients and hospital workers) has declined precipitously since 2022, and most hospitals have relaxed their vaccination requirements significantly.
Aside from malignant anti-vax sentiment, it would be so nice to have a single multivalent vaccine that doesn't require a needle, and might protect against contact pathogens like MRSA as well as respiratory ones.
Or ... you know ... hire more people.
I spent five years in an ED before switching to a different department in the hospital. Even at full staffing, the winter respiratory season is a volumes problem. There are only so many rooms in which patients can be seen. If all the exam rooms are occupied, and the waiting room is still standing room only, additional staff won't do anything to alleviate that. Not to mention, a large portion of the patients will not require care that only an ED can provide. Many could have been seen at an urgent care, by their PCP, or have even self-managed symptoms at home. Prevention measures tend to go much further than staffing measures.
Plus on top of making it more likely that healthcare workers get sick patients who are there for other things may also end up catching one of those nasty respiratory viruses with everyone coughing up a lung in the waiting room.
We try to avoid the ER as much as possible, but with my partner's medical stuff, it is inevitable that a catheter will need an emergency replacement or something else will happen. He hates going because he knows there's a chance he'll end up sicker despite everyone's best efforts. And the flu is a hospital stay for him. But even something else can lead to a pain/cough feedback loop from hell.
The culture here generally discourages one lined zingers but I’ll bite in case anyone else is curious why this isn’t the answer.
Someone below already mentioned the physical limitation of the amount of rooms, so I won’t get too far into that. We already do staff to cover all of those spaces, by the way.
So why not hire more people? That does sound like a great plan. But what do we do with those people for the rest of the months that volume is much slower? Fire them?
Sure we could hire people seasonally. In fact, that does happen every year. It’s what is known as travel nursing. They are non-benefitted employees who are willing to come work grueling conditions at a place where there is no chance for career growth, away from their home and families for the low price of double my wage. What happens when these people come is hospital acquired infections rise sharply, mortality shoots through the roof and the patient satisfaction sharply drops. It is not the flu that causes this, as evidenced by the fact that the same thing happens when they must come in on off season for union strikes. We originally just wanted to hire more people to increase safety right?
For the pandemic hospitals relied on travel nurses to cover staffing, and what happened was hospitals hemorrhaged money during the highest volume they have ever seen. I’m not talking reduced profits, not no profit, I mean literally lost millions to billions of dollars. One might think, “boo hoo ceo lost the opportunity to buy another house” but the real life implication of this is that the hospitals just get shut down. This leads to even worse access to healthcare and this is a huge problem especially in rural areas.
Then we have to think about the physical bodies to hire. There is already a nursing shortage, we do not have more people to hire. How do we fix that, should we lower the already too low bar to pass the NCLEX and become a nurse? Open more schools? The nurse teacher shortage is even larger.
How about we make nursing feel like less of a shitty job? If you got any ideas for how to fix that one, let me know. The amount of nurses who leave the career after just one year is not an insignificant number.
At this point I hope you can see this isn’t a simple thing to fix.
Not the OP, and I generally agree on the zingers respectful callout.
I do think there is some truth in that zinger, though. And I think you more or less acknowledge the partial truth while also pointing out all of its challenges!
Seeing hospitals privatized, and massively consolidated, in my lifetime and in my region ... I can't help but call out how problematic for profit medical industries can be. The profit incentive is a wonderful thing, but it can get rather ... Shall we say ... Perverse.
I'd like to live in a world where we had salutes to health care workers and public school teachers before each NFL game rather than fellating the flag and the armed services. But, our society priorities are what they are.
To me it goes back to Eisenhower:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Address "The Chance for Peace" Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53
So, yeah, that was an indictment of the military industrial complex. And I'm not laying all of it at the hands of CEOs of health care conglomerates that have consolidated the market.
But, shoot, sure would be nice if we spent a lot more money in a collected single payer system on health care! It might not be the simple solution of 'hire more people', but maybe it would be a little better.
Anyways, that's just what my lived experience makes me think about when I hear a zinger about 'hire more people!'.
I completely agree with you, I think the privatization of healthcare is a bastardization to society.
I especially felt this way back when I first started in EMS working for a private ambulance company working as an EMT. I could go on and on about various small things that the for-profit-company made me do that I knew was not in the best interest of the patient that killed me inside.
The way our country allocates resources aka money is despicable quite frankly. But the reason I made my point was because this resentment is turned onto me often (this may not reflect you or OP) and I take the brunt of it in person when I am one on one with the patient and I am just speaking on realistically on changes that could be more likely to happen within the current chain of command. You know, since dismantling capitalism in the medical field is unlikely to happen in my lifetime.
Good chat. Hearing you say it gets dumped onto you is not even the slightest bit surprising. Completely human nature. When you're up against the exploitation machine that's faceless and impossible to change or stop? Lash out again the bag of meat in front of you that 'represents' that medical system.
Sorry you go through that.
In the current "real world" circumstances, your points are well made. I do believe the solutions are still simple ... but not "easy", and in fact, functionally impossible at this stage.
Nutshell ... get money out of politics, overturn the Citizens United ruling, reinstate a 95% top-end income-tax bracket, and massively, federally subsidize the things that are actually important for a society, like ... IDK ... hospitals.
Still zinger-ish, I know, but (shrugs).
Like you said, easy stuff. Won't happen. Wayyyy too much money on the line for the status quo.
The USA is old and tired. Sit down in the rocking chair and let something new come along. Maybe do a bit better.
This seems a bit too good to be true.
But if it does do as it claims I sure hope our medical system doesn't take advantage of this is any way instead of just bettering humanity.
This sounds really rather interesting and an approach i wouldn’t have thought of. The real science publication is here but I haven’t had a chance to go through it properly yet.
There's got to be a downside to keeping a reactive system on standby continuously.
That was my first thought as well, and it seems is a concern of the researchers as well as they move towards human trials.
Still, very exciting as others have mentioned even if it's something you only take situationally (eg. winter cold season).
It's a real concern. My experience was 2 - 3 week autoimmune flare-ups after current 'flu and COVID shots, somewhat improved with biologic immunosuppressants (which also means reduced vaccine response). Anecdata from the RA boards indicate this reaction is common, but it's a population that already has autoimmunity. There's definitive research showing that vaccinations don't increase new autoimmune disease diagnoses significantly, except for rare conditions like those with adenovirus-based vaccines. Turns out that adenoviruses have a protein structure that's directly homologous with human proteins you don't want immunity against.
However, there is clear evidence that viral infections increase new autoimmune disease diagnoses, at least one virus (EBV) is a direct cause of most cases of lupus and multiple sclerosis, and the overall outcomes are much better for vaccinated people than otherwise.
In the original paper, they go into some detail which suggests that intranasal vaccines invoke a different pattern of immunity than intravenous/intramuscular vaccines, and they may be safer in general.
Even if it does end up causing other problems that make it unsuitable for the general population, I wonder if it could be useful for immunocompromised cancer patients.
Does "amber alert" mean anything specific in Britain or are they just more likely to label yellow lights as being amber? Because it means something very specific in the US (abducted child in immediate danger) which I would not use if I were referencing the immune system.
Those in the US will likely know Amber refers to a missing child named amber.
Those in the UK might simply think amber refers to the color yellow/brown, similar to the yellow color in a traffic light, so one step less severe than a red alert.
It's weird cause "yellow alert" and "red alert" are relatively mainstream terms at this point. Weird to go for amber alert that has a totally different meaning.
You are referring to what is mainstream in the US.
This article was not specifically written by an American, and it was not written specifically for an American public.
@updawg was correct, the UK road code calls the colors red, amber, green.
https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/road-safety/traffic-light-sequence-the-ultimate-guide-to-traffic-lights/
I was referring to Star Trek specifically where yellow and red alert are the terms, which is what has seemed to catch on culturally
Star Trek is a US show.
Americans, man. You guys don't even understand there are other cultures if you are given a concrete example. :)
My understanding is Star Trek has become a global cultural icon, like how Doctor Who is a British show but has become well known worldwide, so people across the world have that as a part of their culture and it isn't restricted to just the UK
I think you overestimate the impact of popular memes from foreign cultures. Even the most die hard Star Trek fans in the UK still spend the majority of their lives interacting with other Brits.
Foreign culture is extending local culture, not replacing it. Brits learned from Star Trek that Americans say "yellow alert" instead of "amber alert", but they still say "amber alert" if they talk to each other about things that have zero relation to Star Trek.
If there was a Samurai movie fad in the US, Katana sales would probably go up, but Americans would still kill each other with guns.
Amber alert was a military state of high alert in the UK up until 2006. Before 2006 the UK used the "Bikini Alert State", the US Alert State is called DEFCON.
This is.... so lovely.
I believe the Ministry of Defence maintained that the word “bikini” was randomly selected by a computer... as they do with all code words, to confuse the enemy.
Was the bikini alert state simply too confusing to the public? Were the public having a hard time taking Bikini Alert State - Red as seriously as they should? Was it simply too whimsical for such a serious topic such as terrorism? Or did the UK Ministry of Defense get tired of all the other countries defense departments laughing out loud on the joint conference calls about terrorism threats?
Edit: I apologize for going off topic, but these are important questions.
Worth being excited about the prospect but taking news like this with many grains of salt- in understanding that the study this is referring to was in mice, and those same benefits may or may not translate to humans, and of course all the unknowns in regards to side-effects, downsides, etc.
Still worthwhile science being done, but this is one of those millions of times where the media makes this good work being done and runs with it for a quick headline, before anything is proven to work in humans, etc.
The article does go on to talk about it being in early stages, and being only done in mice, and so on, but the culture of bombastic media headlines running on the fumes of the "excitement of experts" I think does more harm to science communication than good
Is coffee good or bad for me this week? Did you hear about that new battery technology? etc
Very cool, very original/different approach ... however, for that very reason, I feel like this is also an approach that is rife with potential unexpected side-effects and downsides, that no one has even thought to consider yet.
Just as a lay-person, and speaking simply ... after 3 non-stop months of being on "high alert" ... might not an immune system become "tired" or "confused" about activity levels, or about what-all it's supposed to fight against?
Might cure cancer. Might cause it. I won't be first in line, at least.
ETA: Reading more than just the first 4 paragraphs now, I see a lot of my concerns are shared.
Kind of a tangent ... wasn't one of the top issues of Covid effectively caused by an over-reaction of the immune system? I remember the phrase "cytokine storm".
The biggest obvious area for concern is stuff like autoimmune disorders rather than cancers. Cytokine storms are severe, dangerous immune responses with high mortality and is sometimes caused in Covid (and it's a bad sign for those who get it), but their underlying cause in Covid varies, and idk how similar the observed mechanisms are to what's involved in this particular new vaccine treatment. Because viral infections themselves can trigger a lot of autoimmune stuff, once we have a better sense of the risk it'd have to be weighed against the risks of suffering the viral disease(s) the treatment protects from.
Wouldn't the immune system be at an elevated state during cold and flu season anyway? If I could get through it without my sinuses blocking up, it doesn't feel like that bad of a tradeoff.
The immune system is at an elevated state once you're fighting an infection, but not all elevated states are alike. Very few people get the kind of serious autoimmune reaction the person I replied to mentioned from common winter viruses. If you don't already have an autoimmune problem, your immune system shouldn't ordinarily be elevated during cold/flu season until it actually encounters some pathogen (which seems to be why the approach here is novel), and it should dedicate its resources to fighting pathogens rather than attacking your own body.