WHAT IS A VACCINE ANF HOW DOES IT FUNCTION?

Immunity varies from person to person. Often we are faced with such diseases, by which our immune system makes antibodies but we cannot get rid of that disease and if the infection is more, then it can be fatal so we would use vaccines for that disease.

The vaccine helps our immune system do its job better and faster and protects us from serious diseases. More formally speaking According to Wikipedia a vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and often made from the weekend or killed form of the microbes. When we get a vaccine, it’s parked in our immune response, helping our body fight off and remember the germ so it can attack it(acquired immunity). if the germ ever invaded again and since vaccines are made of a very small amount of weak a dead zones they won’t make us sick. vaccines often provide long-lasting immunity to serious diseases without the risk of serious illness.

During the late 1760s whilst serving his apprenticeship, a surgeon Edward Jenner learned of the story, common in rural areas, that dairy workers would never have the the the often-fatal or disfiguring disease smallpox because they already had cowpox which has a very mild effect in humans. Jenner took pus from the hand of milk made with cowpox, scratched it into the arms of a healthy/ normal person. After a few weeks later I inoculated the person’s body with smallpox, afterward observing that the person did not catch smallpox. from there the concept of vaccines came. Later in 1880, Louis Pasteur developed vaccines for chicken cholera and Anthrax. Vaccines are one of the greatest advancements in the history of public health. Vaccines are responsible for eliminating smallpox and reducing more than 95% many more of common childhood diseases like diphtheria measles and polio, which once killed hundreds of thousands.

TYPES OF VACCINES

The challenge in vaccine development consists of devising a vaccine strong enough to ward off infection without making the individual seriously ill. To that end, researchers have devised different types of vaccines like –

1. Live attenuated vaccine

2. Inactivated vaccine

3. Subunit vaccine

4. Toxoid vaccine

5. Conjugated vaccine

6. D.N.A vaccine

7. Recombinant vaccine

8. R.N.A vaccine

   And many more.                                      

In the Part – 4, which is the final one. We will discuss some of the common vaccine and their working.