Vaccines have been in the news a lot this week because Wednesday was exclusion day in Oregon schools. (The first day unvaccinated students aren’t allowed to attend school without records explaining the decision.) OHSU Oregon National Primate Research Center researcher Mark Slifka, Ph.D., has appeared in several stories to talk about vaccines and the role they play. Here he is on KGW this week. Dr. Slifka will talk further … Read More
Recently, we sent out a press release on a unique HIV vaccine strategy being attempted by OHSU’s Dr.Jonah Sacha and his team. Their goal: To try and outsmart AIDS. From our release: [Sacha's] studies are based on lessons learned from the immune response to both HIV and cancer. Instead of targeting the highly mutable virus itself, the new approach will target a surrogate marker of HIV infection to block the transmission of HIV. I wanted … Read More
Some exciting news today from OHSU’s Oregon National Primate Research Center. OHSU Scientist Dr. Mark Slifka published a paper that may change and improve the way vaccines are made. An excerpt from our OHSU press release explains the breakthrough: “Most vaccines have an outstanding safety record,” explained Slifka. “It is important to keep in mind that no medical achievement has saved more lives than the simple act of vaccination. However, for many diseases, we have … Read More
I just spotted a neat video on You Tube that echoes something that I hear in the hallways of OHSU all the time: That vaccines are one of modern medicine’s greatest achievements. We’ve had several significant breakthroughs when it comes to vaccines, especially at the OHSU Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute . See here, here and here. Here’s the video. If you have 3 minutes and 51 seconds..it’s well worth the time.
Health research tends to look to the future. But every once and a while, we also need to look in the rearview mirror We just spotted this article about a major success story. In a sentence: Chickenpox deaths may be a thing of the past thanks to previous vaccination efforts. A full copy of the study has been made available to the public and it can be read here. Unless you have been on a … Read More
