Monsanto Edible Vaccines

Regardless of how vaccines for infectious diseases are delivered, they all have the same aim: priming the immune system to swiftly destroy specific disease-causing agents, or pathogens, before the agents can multiply enough to cause symptoms. Classically, this priming has been achieved by presenting the immune system with whole viruses or bacteria that have been killed or made too weak to proliferate much.

On detecting the presence of a foreign organism in a vaccine, the immune system behaves as if the body were under attack by a fully potent antagonist. It mobilizes its various forces to root out and destroy the apparent invader-targeting the campaign to specific antigens (proteins recognized as foreign). The acute response soon abates, but it leaves behind sentries, known as "memory" cells, that remain on alert, ready to unleash whole armies of defenders if the real pathogen ever finds its way into the body. Some vaccines provide lifelong protection; others (such as those for cholera and tetanus) must be readministered periodically.

Classic vaccines pose a small but troubling risks that the vaccine microorganisms will somehow spring back to life, causing the diseases they were meant to forestall. For that reason, vaccine makers today favor so-called subunit preparations, composed primarily of antigenic proteins divorced from a pathogen's genes. On their own, the proteins have no way of establishing an infection. Subunit vaccines, however, are expensive, in part because they are produced in cultures of bacteria or animal cells and have to be purified out; they also need to be refrigerated.


[link to www.quasar.ualberta.ca]