Vaccine Tattoos
A German study published this month in Genetic Vaccines and Therapy suggests that injecting DNA-containing vaccines with a tattoo gun (lacking the ink that normally creates the tattoo) is far more effective than the way human vaccines are now delivered. The study showed that administering pieces of DNA from the human papillomavirus virus into the skin of mice by three tattoo-gun injections produced a 200-fold greater production of antibodies to the virus than was achieved with the old method of a needle injection into a muscle.
Tattoo injections are thought to be more effective because the repeated puncturing of the skin by the rotating tattoo needle does real damage to the skin — the presence of a bona fide wound causes inflammatory cells to flood into the site, where they speed and enhance the immune response to the vaccine.
DNA vaccines can be grown in bacteria, an approach that makes it possible to produce DNA vaccines in large quantities and much faster than current procedures. The use of tattoo injections, coupled with the ability to rapidly produce large quantities of a vaccine, might prove extraordinarily valuable in a situation such as a threatened terrorist attack, where a sudden need arises for large amounts of an effective vaccine.
via Yahoo Health
Tattoo’s for EVERYONE!
Wouldn’t this make Border Checks so much more fun?
“Sir, roll up your sleeve.. we need to check you for Hep A immunity before you can enter New Orleans”
And you can collect the whole set:
“But Mum, I want the Ebola Tattoo.. pllllllllease!”
“No Jimmy. You’ve got to wait til the Anthrax one heals”.
This would actually be incredibly useful for the military or even for civilian use. And since this method is supposed to be more effective (note- human testing still needed) you can do it somewhere that has plenty of surface area and wouldn’t hurt very much like the top of the forearm. They could be done in stripes simultaneously with each stripe being a different vaccine.
And actually m1k3y your idea is very close to the truth. They can already experimentally “tag” genes in such a way that they can be read with handheld equipment. (Chemical tags if I’m not mistaken. Someone please correct me.) Something like this would be close to the skin. The antibodies could be designed to drop their tags, forming an invisible but machine readable tattoo that would function like a semi-permanent “shot-card” like what they used to use for frequent travelers. (People who travel in disease prone areas still use these. I still have mine from Sumatra.)