Swine Flu, the second wave

[Blaaaaaaaah]

You have to understand that drugs, vaccines and such all have to go under clinical trials before they can be administered to the public. I believe these procedures are very strict and they would have had to gone through several experiments to ensure that things are fine. There are 4-5 phases of clinical trials - I don't exactly remember the details, but I know that one part involves having volunteers to try it out (I think that's the last part. It may sound like "OMG human testing?!?!" but I believe they do several tests before the volunteers get to try it anyway so it's not like "lets try to see if this works in humans!! -injects-").


Granted, there have been "bad accidents" with new drugs back in the past during clinical trials where people had serious side effects... but that's in clinical trials. I don't think they would easily let vaccines go out to the public with "a few tests" and that's it. Unless you're part of the volunteers for these trials.. I kinda doubt it anything would really bad would happen.


That said, everyone can have different responses to vaccines (or any drugs, for that matter) and it may be hard to predict the precise outcome. And I guess accidents will be accidents, where if anything bad did happen, people cannot avoid it (unless experiments/clinical trials/etc weren't carried out properly.. it's happened in the past but I guess we -should have- learnt from mistakes in the past trials o.o). I think with influenza viruses, as long as the "majority" of the population has immunity to it, it'll be okay.


Well. After all that rambling. All I'm trying to say is that if they are ready to distribute a vaccine to the public, it should be relatively safe.


Am I gonna take it? I dunno. This would be several months down the track.


Edit:

I missed this post.

Still, yeah they're not going to release one super quick, but they may never know the side-effects of it, even if it's a new vaccine. My bio teacher, told me that there was this one vaccine that all pregnant women took, then 30 years later, most of their kids were schizophrenic. So, you never know.

But that's something hardly anyone can predict, especially when it's something that happens 30 years down the track. Risks like this can't be really avoided imo. You might as well not take any vaccines that are produced from now on if you're worried about something like that.

[lamchopz]

^ What Blaahs said.

This reminds me of the thalidomide incident where pregnant women were prescirbed the drug to treat morning sickness. It turned out that thalidomide caused limb abnormalities in the infants. The problem is that no one would have been able to predict that.

Only when the situation arises, the problem is brought into everyone's attention, despite prior testing that was done to legitimise the use of a particular drug. Lots of pharmacological agents were approved then withdrawn over the years by the body responsible for releasing the drugs to the general public, e.g. the FDA in America.

The current development of biochemistry and genetic study is not yet adequate to allow us to map all cause-effect relationships pertaining to individual drugs and pathogens. This is why the nature of A(H1N1) is still unclear and to identify its origin as well as to predict that this specific reassortant strain would be infectious is still not possible with our current technology.

The bottomline is yes, it's unfortunate that sometimes accidents happen but for the most part:

drugs, vaccines and such all have to go under clinical trials before they can be administered to the public.

[...]

if they are ready to distribute a vaccine to the public, it should be relatively safe.

That about sums up what it is happening in our society at the moment.