How Vaccines Work

Most people accept the fact that vaccines protect them from diseases. But many still wonder: how do they work?
Most everyone’s immune system works effectively to help them fight off illnesses. A vaccine is like a trainer for that system, reports December’s Texas Medical Association (TMA) Texas Medicine magazine. When a physician or other health care worker gives someone a shot, that patient’s body thinks the vaccine is an invading disease. So the body creates a defense against it. The shot triggers a person’s natural defenses to build up against what it perceives to be an infectious attacker. If the real disease ever does attack, the body is ready for it. Those defenses kick in, and thwart the attack.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes it this way: “Vaccines contain a small number of weakened or dead antigens, the parts of germs that cause [someone’s] immune system to go to work. After [the person] receives a vaccine, their immune system – or antibodies in the system – will remember that antigen and attack it if it ever enters the body again.”
Because scientists make vaccines from a weakened or dead version of a germ, they almost always are too weak to make a person sick. The person’s immune system recognizes the antigen as a threat and responds, building up immunity to the disease.
“Vaccines have been a huge advance we’ve seen in the last century that have made an enormous impact on the health not only of Texans and the United States, but of the entire world,” said Jennifer Shuford, MD, in this TMA video. Dr. Shuford is the infectious disease medical officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, and consultant to TMA’s Committee on Infectious Diseases.

[randbarrett]

It’s amazing that this is controversial information