As we’ve learned in our microbiology class, a vaccination is the most effective method of controlling infectious diseases. Vaccination prevents people from serious and even fatal diseases such as diphtheria, Hepatitis A and B, measles, chickenpox, and many others.
This short animation I chose to watch briefly explains the types of vaccines and their functions.
There are different ways to produce the vaccines, but usually vaccine consists of weakened or killed pathogens that stimulate immune response.
The first type of vaccines is attenuated vaccines – contain live but weakened microbes. Trough the process called attenuation, the pathogen loses its virulence but still has enough antigens to elicit the immune system.
The second type is inactivated vaccines and one of them is subunit vaccines. Subunit vaccines contain fragments of antigens instead of whole microorganism.
Recombinant vaccines are produced by cloning the gene of desired antigen.
In this animation wasn’t discussed one more type of vaccines which is toxoid vaccines. Toxoid vaccines are modified toxins (treated with heat or chemicals), that are used in vaccines to stimulate the body to produce protective immunity. Examples of toxoid vaccines are diphtheria and tetanus vaccines.
I realy apriciate that I had a chance to learn about role and importance of vaccination. These days people have different concerns about safty of vaccination so the information I've learnd realy helps me to be confident about its usage. http://www.1lecture.com/Immunology/Vaccine/index.html
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I really liked this video clip because it was very nicely illustrated and was very clear to understand. This clip was a good overview on the different types of vaccines. The summary for this posting had very good descriptions of each type of vaccines and even mentioned more information on this subject.
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