Applied Immunology...subunit vaccines Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Applied Immunology...subunit vaccines - Essay Example In Subunit Vaccines, as the name suggest, only the specific fragment of a microbe or an infectious agent (Thecochranelibrary.com, 2014). These fragments might be epitopes which are specific parts of an antigen that are easily recognizable to the antibodies or T cells. Subunit vaccines consist of about 1-20 or sometimes even more antigens, whereas it is an intense task to specify which antigen would prove the most efficient stimulator (Flower and Perrie, 2013). There are two ways of manufacturing these vaccines once the appropriate antigen has been identified: All vaccines go through careful evaluation to make sure that they are safe for consumption; however, there are some flaws in the structure of traditional vaccines that were illuminated with the creation of subunit vaccines. Usually, inactive pathogens are introduced into the immune system of a human being as a vaccine; being inactive means that the pathogen can no longer cause a disease because the viral fragment has been deactivated. The one problem with this procedure is the chance or reversion. Reversion is the process by which a microbe undergoes genetic changes, converting it into an even deadlier threat to the human body (Vaccine-safety-training.org, 2014). This risk if eradicated in the case of subunit vaccines because only the structural fragments of a pathogen are used, which means that there can be no genetic changes, hence no damage to the human body may occur (Stratton, Wilson, and McCormick, 2002). Another shortcoming of traditional live vaccines is that they cannot be used by certain groups of people, such as the elderly above 65 or even pregnant women. This is because even attenuated viruses can pose a threat to the health of these people, making it fatal for them to use these vaccines. Similar to the case before, subunit vaccines are introduced in the body as small fragments rather than a whole microbe so