Word: vaccinees
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The job of a vaccine is to impart immunity against a given disease to a person by educating the immune system. The idea is to expose a person to an antigen without causing the full-blown effects of the disease normally associated with it.
The trick for vaccine designers is to find an antigen which fools the immune system into thinking it is a dangerous foe, but is actually a harmless look-alike.
Realizing this, in the early 1950s, Dr. Jonas Salk used injections of dead polio viruses as a vaccine against the crippling and sometimes fatal disease, which rose to epidemic proportions each summer to strike victims such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04. On April 12, 1955, U.S. health officials proclaimed the...
But Associate Professor of Tropical Public Health Donald A. Harn, who works on vaccines against the tropical disease schistosomiasis, says that finding the right antigen when attempting a recombinant vaccine, as they are known, "is the most critical and difficult thing to do."
While creating recombinant vaccines doesn't always work, scientists can take hope in one success, a recombinant vaccine against the Hepatitis B virus.