Edible Vaccines “To Replace Jabs”

An edible allergy vaccine could one day replace injections, a study says. Jabs, which build up antibodies are used to treat severe forms of hay-fever and cat and venom allergies, but can sometimes trigger dangerous reactions. The Japanese researchers said the rice-based vaccine they tested on mice is less dangerous and more simple. They wrote in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences that it “opens new possibilities” for allergy treatment in the future. One in four people are estimated to suffer from allergies, ranging from reactions to food to respiratory and skin allergies. Most can be controlled by regulating diet and the immediate environment - or drugs can be taken to limit the symptoms. But for severe hay-fever and cat allergies, as well as for people with particularly bad reactions to bee and wasp stings, courses of anti-allergy injections can be given. These can take a couple of years to complete and have to be done in hospital because of the danger of the allergens given in the jabs prompting an anaphylactic reaction - injections all but stopped for a while in the UK in the 1980s because of a number of deaths. The vaccine developed by the joint University of Tokyo and Shimane University team uses genetically-modified rice to build up the immune system.

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