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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

How is this different than the nearly universal use of vaccines?

Before you compulsively knee-jerk and claim that I think vaccines are evil and cause autism, take a breath.

The most damming argument against vaccines is that the continual use of vaccines (i.e. forced antibody production) produces same set of evolutionary selectors that help create 'superbugs' that injected antibiotics are often derided for.

However this basic biological fact escapes most people that haven't taken Biology 102 and beyond (which is 99% of the population).

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One of the goals of vaccination is to deprive pathogens of an environment faster than selection pressure allows the pathogen to evade the vaccine. That's how we drove smallpox to extinction in the wild.

I think your reply just encapsulated what I wrote in a much more eloquent way. :-)

Also, don't we mostly vaccinate against viruses, whereas antibiotics are to be used against bacterial infections?

Antibiotics are, by and large, reactive. Vaccines are, by and large, prophylactic.

I am the furthest thing from an expert in this field, but the herd immunity from vaccines provides an entirely different protection than a 'toolset' of working antibiotics.

My naive understanding is that if you have 100% vaccine coverage, it's simply way more unlikely that a virus or bacterium can catch a foothold of reproduction that would even make possible the mutations that result in resistance. And then you have viruses like influenza that are so widespread and elusive that they change annually. But we've gotten really good at responding to that rapid change as well.

Vaccines have actually caused the extinction of two specific pathogens in the wild though herd immunity. With several rappidly approaching that. Antibiotics are less effective leading to resistance.

Polio is down to 385 recorded cases in 2011 from 400,000 estimated and 52,552 recorded in 1980.

There is even some progress with Malaria.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_disea...

Community density and population migration is a large factor in vaccine effectiveness. What most vaccines provide is really herd immunity. That is a disease, if it spreads, will be limited to a select few who aren't able to vaccinate or have compromised immune systems, preventing an outbreak of wide proportions among an otherwise healthy population.

It's a bit more complex than the widespread and largely unnecessary antibiotic abuse happening in livestock farms. Unnecessary because more sanitary and efficient methods exist for raising them that obviate their need. Disease can be contained by quarantine and preventative measures which isn't possible among a migratory population like humans.

Antibiotics kill bacteria. Bacteria can evolve resistance.

Vaccines prevent infection. Viruses that are unable to infect new hosts are very likely to die off. They can mutate as well, but if enough people in a population are vaccinated, it's very unlikely for the virus to mutate in such a way as to avoid the mechanisms by which the vaccine works.

Viruses and bacteria are different things. Bacteria just need a food source, and they're good to go; you'll have enormous numbers of them as long as their food source can sustain them. Viruses need a host cell. Vaccines don't kill viruses, they prevent viruses from spreading.

I have never heard any scientist or public health official claim that use of vaccines will lead to super-viruses. That, I assume, is something made up by the vaccine deniers.

Don't working immune systems create the same selective pressure already?

If an infection kills me, I'm not around to pass the infection on anymore… at least, once my corpse has been dealt with. If I do survive and the same pathogen wants to infect me again, or keep the current infection going, it has to find a way to dodge my immune system.

Malaria hides in red blood cells. HIV hides in immune cells, plus it mutates like crazy. HSV and VZV also manage to take permanent residence. HCV usually does too, which is particularly nasty because it can take decades for symptoms to appear, and those symptoms are caused by gradual liver damage.

Given what happens when we have spotty natural immunity, being able to immunize most of a population in short order seems like an excellent thing.

But isn't the main difference that a new vaccine can easily be created for any new strain of a bacteria or virus, whereas once something becomes resistant to an antibiotic then that antibiotic is now worthless to fight that infection, and antibiotics are extremely rare and difficult to create.

Indeed, flu viruses do react to selection pressures, but we deal with it by making a new vaccine each year: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigenic_drift

Which is not to say that we could not benefit from further research into the process.

I wouldn't say either are "easy". A new vaccine for the flu every year is more like finding a new lock combo solution for the same lock (recombinant DNA).

Having to find a new antibiotic more like an entirely different door. Vaccines merely find a way to train our immune systems to tag the villain. Anti biotics have to actually find weaknesses and exploit a biochemical pathway that can be disrupted etc.

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