What’s in a vaccine?

Waaaaaay back in the first post of my sub series on vaccines I said I would cover vaccine styles, how they work (and Pt. 2) and why we can’t rely on therapeutics alone. I promise I’ll get to the last one at some point but after a couple of weeks writing about vaccines something occurred to me that I hadn’t really thought about before, what is actually in a vaccine?

Tetanus – the eternal struggle between Man and Rusty Nail

This article has been published previously in a 2006 edition of On Dit (the University of Adelaide student magazine), but like the media bastards they are, they edited and gutted it to nothing. Here’s the full article as intended. Also, I did write it as an undergrad so please forgive any mistakes, factual, grammatical or otherwise.

Picture taken by Thomas Tu

Holy stinking faeces, Batman!

You might wonder why you need to get a tetanus shot whenever you impale yourself with a stick or rub manure into your newly-acquired open wound. It’s because ~100 000 people die every year from tetanus every year, you dirty coprophiliac! OK, that’s misleading; most deaths are newly-born babies due to unsanitary birthing conditions, but even healthy adults can still die if left untreated.