Immunisation Week: Experts emphasise importance of understanding history of vaccines
Pathologist at the Centre for Vaccines and Immunology, Dr Kerrigan McCarthy said vaccines go through many rigorous trials before they are ready.
Picture: 123rf.com/Iurii Golub
CAPE TOWN - As Immunisation Week draws to a close, experts have emphasised the importance of understanding the history of vaccines.
According to the World Health Organization, humans have searched for ways to protect themselves against diseases for centuries, going as far as exposing healthy people to smallpox to test their medication.
Pathologist at the Centre for Vaccines and Immunology, Dr Kerrigan McCarthy, said vaccines go through many rigorous trials before they are ready.
"The biologists and the chemists who develop these vaccines, take the protein that are found in infectious diseases and separate them from the rest of the virus or the bacterium that causes disease and present them to us in the form of a vaccine, so that our body can develop antibodies to that part of the infectious disease and not the whole thing.”
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McCarthy added that vaccines contain ingredients that help your body build immunity.
"So, vaccines are very clever, they build on our own natural immune systems. So, when we come across an infectious disease, our immune systems recognise the shape of these proteins that are part of the communicable disease, and we develop antibodies to them.”