Vaccinate, or begone. Some pediatricians are refusing to see children whose parents refuse to allow vaccination.
posted by bitmage on Feb 15, 2012 - 344 comments

Recently, 8-year-old Precious Reynolds became the sixth person in history to survive rabies without a vaccine. A few years back, Extraordinary People put out a documentary (1 2 3) on the first person to beat the only viral disease that hides itself completely from one's immune system.
posted by gman on Jun 14, 2011 - 56 comments

Inducement Prizes -- Best known for the Ansari X Prize, the DARPA Grand Challenge and the Clay Mathematics Millennium Problems, inducement prizes have a long history, but their recent successes have led to increased government interest, viz. challenge.gov, and resulted in the development of vaccines, thanks in large part to the work of Michael Kremer.^* [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jan 6, 2011 - 8 comments

A German researcher accidentally jabbed her finger with a hypodermic loaded with the deadly Ebola virus. 48 hours later, she was injected with an untested, experimental vaccine, developed by an international team of virologists and biologists. Though she may never have been infected, she was certainly in danger; in 2004, a similar incident caused the death of a Russian scientist at a former Soviet biological weapons lab.
posted by permafrost on Mar 29, 2009 - 39 comments

A scientist discovers that scorpions make two types of venoms. Cool. But he made the discovery while attempting to find a toxin that he wants to put into a common cold virus, in order to kill insects that catch the cold? Shouldn't we be worried about this?
posted by titboy on Jan 21, 2003 - 16 comments