Defence against viruses - Different types of vaccines - Live attenuated vaccine
3 important questions on Defence against viruses - Different types of vaccines - Live attenuated vaccine
What is a Live attenuated vaccine?
This is a weakened form of the pathogen that generally doesn’t cause a disease. When injected it causes an undetectable or mild symptoms infection that will typically result in long lasting immunity.
How can you attenuate micro-organisms/viruses?
This is typically done were a pathogenetic virus is isolated from a patient and then grown in human cultured cells. The cultured virus is then used to infect monkey cells, before the virus can infect monkey cells the virus needs to undergo mutations that allows them to grow in these cells. The virus is now no longer able to grow well in human cells and can then be used as a vaccine in humans.
What are the advantage and the disadvantages of the attenuated vaccines?
The advantage is that there is a larger sustained dose of antigen and is easy to create but the disadvantage is that it is a possibility that the virus can mutate back to the original type and thus become pathogenetic again and it can be infectious in immunodeficient people.
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