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Successes and failures with vaccines

Published on December 31, 2019   37 min

A selection of talks on Immunology

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0:00
My name is Dr. Stanley Plotkin. I am a vaccinologist of long date. I am at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, United States. I am a medical doctor and have written extensively about vaccines and developed several.
0:25
So the effect of vaccines on public health has been tremendous as everyone should know. With this slide gives our data from the United States for a number of diseases for which we have practiced vaccination for some years. It shows the number of cases of individual diseases before the use of vaccines early in the 20th century, and then the number of cases currently where of course what we see a tremendous drop. This effect is probably more important than any other medical intervention.
1:10
So this slide shows one of the two general strategies for developing vaccines in the past, and that is attenuation. The first one, of course, was Jenner's vaccinia. But then Louis Pasteur, about 80 years later, started to physically attenuate agent such as rabies, and that gave us really the first general vaccines that could be given by injection. Then in the 20th century, passage of agents in animals or in eggs, as in the case of the yellow fever vaccine, gave us more vaccines. Finally, the invention of passage of viruses and cell culture after the Second World War resulted in a exploration of vaccines such as measles, mumps, rubella, and others.

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