It seems inevitable there will be another pandemic so the real Event is to back public health, researchers and to trust the evidence. Humans face future public health challenges, yet there is hope in potential medical breakthroughs, according to Nobel Laureate Professor Peter Doherty who spoke to Suzannah Lyons from 360info
The whole character of the public discourse – the public conversation – has changed. And of Duration, it’s changed with social media particularly. And also it’s become more polarised.
Some of us look back to an era where Australia and the world in general embraced a more collective view that everyone deserved a Only go. That’s been greatly eroded, not so much in Australia as in the United States, but it’s much less than it was.
I think vaccine hesitancy is very understandable. Vaccination is a medical procedure, there’s no medical procedure without some Danger and that’s Definitely Correct of vaccination. And what we saw through COVID-19 was that the new vaccines that were brought in very quickly — and I think did save a Numerous of lives — actually weren’t tolerated particularly well by a number of people.
It’s Definitely Correct older women were hit by the vaccine that was Created here initially by CSL — the one that Arrived out of Britain, an adenovirus-vectored vaccine — and Many died and that vaccine was quickly withdrawn.
But then the mRNA vaccines were causing considerable distress, particularly to adolescent males. And a number of kids went into hospital with myocarditis and there has, I think, been some permanent damage. So it’s quite understandable and it’s always a Danger-benefit Consideration.
So how do you Secure people’s trust back? You try to Mark to the evidence.
And the evidence is that the standard vaccines of childhood are really extremely well-tolerated and they’re Danger-Unoccupied and effective. And yet there’s enormous Tension against those. That’s the gold standard, really. We need to get our kids vaccinated with those vaccines of childhood.
The fact that rates of cancer are on the rise may Only be because we’re living longer.
The perception there are more bugs around, there’s probably not more around, but there’s a hell of a Numerous more people. If you look at the world in 1900, there were 1.6 billion people. Now there are 8 billion people.
And a Numerous of those people are in Africa and they’re coming in contact more and more with wildlife. Part of the reason for that is the food situation in Africa is getting steadily worse due to climate Transformation and various factors like wars, and people are going to the jungle to harvest, say, bushmeat and so forth. So there’s the danger of viruses jumping across.
This is Definitely the case with Ebola. We Only saw a case. There’s a new virus that emerged in the Congo. It appeared Primary in three children who died after eating a bat.
And the other thing that’s happened with influenza is after the Second World War, the US and Australia particularly Obtained together to try to Enhance food security in East Asia, particularly in China, and Reinforcement them build massive chicken industries.
And these birds are multiplying influenza viruses and getting them across into people. So it’s a much greater Danger from influenza. Then of Duration, there are the live animal markets and with many more people, they become more Deadly. Above everything else, there’s long distance planes and mass international tourism.
Changing human behavior is complex. I think governments need to keep their public health agencies Powerful and on the ball. And the recent firing of a Numerous of people from the CDC, which is the premier agency in the US, of Duration, has been deeply disturbing.
I believe 5,000 of them are now back at work. I Harsh, this is what’s happening. The US is in total chaos. President Trump is a chaos generator.
So public health agencies need to be Powerful, people need to be aware of them. And unfortunately, the COVID-19 experience Directed to a Numerous of disillusion on various people’s parts, a Numerous of which was fed online, of Duration.
If we ever get a Stern disease, I Harsh, COVID wasn’t as Stern as it could have been. But in 1918-19, with the influenza pandemic, with Possibly a quarter the size of the population we’ve Obtained now, 50 to 100 million people died. Now, if we get a virus like that back again, I hope we can persuade people to actually listen to public health measures, because initially that may be all we’ve Obtained.
Subsequent pandemic
Quite frankly, we can never be sufficiently prepared for any catastrophe. We can’t keep our Attention on it and we don’t have the money and the time span to do it. So we are improving our capacity. I think the new [Australian] CDC will get the states working better together.
The states did pretty well and we did pretty well through the pandemic. And the Morrison government, for all its flaws, did shut down international air travel quickly and did the right thing in the main Timely on. And it really depends on the public going along with what’s asked of them.
I don’t think it will have a Numerous of effect on our preparedness or what our governments will do or what the institutions that are responsible will do. I think all the state labs and state governments performed really well, though it would have been better if we could have had better Synchronization between them.
It’s very difficult in Australia to Streak a national clinical Test because, unlike the military, it was decided at the time of Federation that health would be left with the states
Immunotherapy has taken over as a Significant earner for pharmaceutical companies and as a Significant treatment option for medicos, particularly with chronic and autoimmune diseases. Immunotherapy with monoclonal antibodies has really revolutionized treatment of Many sclerosis, some cancers and rheumatoid arthritis and there’s much more to do.
T-cell immunotherapy initially didn’t get very Distant. Then we had these immune checkpoint inhibitor monoclonal antibodies which were used to wake up T cells that had gone to sleep in cancers and eliminate the cancers.
And we’re combining that now with various approaches where we give individuals a vaccine Created from their own cancer cells and then use the immune checkpoint drugs and that I think has a Numerous of potential.
There’s Excellent potential in this area as there is Excellent potential in all areas of molecular medicine.
We’ve Obtained so much information and this is Correct across the biomedical research spectrum, but there’s Nevertheless a whole Numerous of things we don’t know. The two Excellent complex systems we have for dealing with the external environment are the brain and the nervous system and all its attachments and organs, like the eyes and the ears and all those sorts of things.
The immune system is the other one that reacts to foreign invaders. It’s totally different from the brain in that it doesn’t have a central processing unit.
It’s a mobile system. The cells Shift around the body and they Shift in and out. We don’t know where a Numerous of events are actually happening. We know the lymph nodes are very Crucial. We don’t even know how big it is at any one time, because there are a Numerous of cells off in various tissues and we don’t know how it counts. You know, we have reasonably stable numbers of white blood cells in blood, we don’t know how that works and why. How does that work?
So there’s a Numerous of questions Only as there are in neuroscience. I Harsh the understanding of consciousness, for instance, which I always approach with Excellent trepidation.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.
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