View Full Version : Math Story Question: How Many Eggs Does it Take ?
The world uses eggs to develop vaccines for flu and yellow fever innoculations. In a normal season, for just the US, the vaccine producing agents (the ones overseas) make around 18M doses of vaccine for the flu for export to the US. If one egg produces enough vaccine for X innoculations, how many eggs are required to meet the demand?
Extra Credit: Besides the US what other country harvests 6.5B eggs per year? Why doesn't the US market provide vaccine for US consumption?
Extra-Extra Credit: Find for X.
"Once the decision is made, the rush to manufacture vaccine is on. For the present, vaccines are still grown in an "old fashioned" way. Chosen viral strains are inoculated into 90 million fertilized chicken eggs in which the viruses are incubated. The eggs are opened, and the virus is extracted and purified. Then the virus is treated chemically to kill it while preserving the normal shape of its coat proteins. Each final dose of vaccine is very small, containing scarcely fifteen millionths of a gram of each of three different viral strains. Yet that tiny amount of foreign protein, injected into your body, is enough to place your entire immune system on red alert. Assuming that you are vaccinated at least a week before you are exposed to live virus, your B-cells and T-cells will be ready to defend you — but only against the strains contained in the vaccine."
source: www .millerandlevine.com/news/flu/index-4.html
literally a textbook answer hot from the google iron, and probably missing 15 steps, not that I would know (Went to school for engineering, not biochem) but I do agree in substance with what you are saying, especially considering that the CDC viewed H1N1 as a pandemic in what, April? 2009.
And the stuff highlighted in red are just 2 of the places where I can see H1N1 vaccines not being ready.
All this is MOO of course.
HowardCohodas
10-26-2009, 13:45
Thank tort lawyers for moving our vaccine industry out of the US.
Thank economics and resistance to change for being slow to approve recombinant DNA technology rather than egg incubation technology to produce vaccines.
Flu vaccine rush puts focus on calls for faster delivery (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-10-08-flu-vaccines_N.htm)
The Reaper
10-26-2009, 13:50
Thank tort lawyers for moving our vaccine industry out of the US.
Thank economics and resistance to change for being slow to approve recombinant DNA technology rather than egg incubation technology to produce vaccines.
Flu vaccine rush puts focus on calls for faster delivery (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-10-08-flu-vaccines_N.htm)
President Ford made a bad call then, and the USG stiffed the vaccine manufacturers.
Between that and the lawyers....
TR