Saturday, March 31, 2012

Heart attack vaccines?

While trying to find the original article for the Telegraph article announcing a possible heart attack vaccine I found another article that suggests that smallpox vaccine can increase the likelihood of heart attacks.

The Telegraph reports that

A vaccine delivered in an injection or nasal spray to prevent heart attacks could be available within five years.

Scientists have discovered that the drug stimulates the body's immune system to produce antibodies which prevent heart disease by stopping fat building up in the arteries.

The CDC reports that

Careful monitoring of smallpox vaccinations given over recent months has suggested that the vaccine may cause heart inflammation (myocarditis), inflammation of the membrane covering the heart (pericarditis), and/or a combination of these two problems (myopericarditis). Experts are exploring this more in depth.

Heart pain (angina) and heart attack also have been reported following smallpox vaccination. However, it is not known at this time if smallpox vaccination caused these problems or if they occurred by chance.

Interesting. We learned a few years back that many ulcers were caused, not directly by stress, but by an infectious organism; and there are known correlations between gum disease and heart attacks. Wild surmise time...

My first thought was that they'd located the connection, but apparently they're working along another front. It sounds (I wish I could find the report--I don't have easy access to medical scholarly reports and I don't read Swedish) as though they encourage antibodies that attack either the fat buildup or the precursors to it. Either approach sounds like it would have side effects somewhere. I'm guessing that the fat buildup is an exaggeration of some normal function in the body.

Jan Nilsson: 'phase 2' studies are about to begin...
In cooperation with the Swedish biotechnology company Bioinvent from Lund and the American company Genentech.

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