Comments on: Marvel Zombies 4 #1: A Medical Review

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:12:13 +0000

Andreas- a healthy diet would help; I’m assuming zombies aren’t ‘part of this healthy breakfast.’

By: SanctumSanctorumComix

SanctumSanctorumComix — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:38:57 +0000

This technical discourse is all fine and dandy, but is this anti-Zombie-Virus Vaccine going to be covered in the proposed overhaul of the U.S. medical coverage plan?

Or am I going to have to sneak over the border to get some from Canada?

Hmmm… maybe I’ll have Doctor Voodoo take a look into it.
He combines the best of western medicine AND homeopathy (or necropathy… whichever works).

~P~
PTOR

By: Xenobiologista

Xenobiologista — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:15:14 +0000

Vaccinia (the smallpox vaccine) can cause severe disease not only in people with weak immune systems, but also those with skin problems like eczema. People who are vaccinated are given strict instructions to not mess with the vaccination site blister, throw away your dressings in a plastic bag, and avoid children. One stupid US Army soldier didn’t follow instructions and almost killed his young son who had eczema.

This is why the world is switching to a very much weakened strain called Modified Vaccinia Ankara for smallpox vaccination soon. MVA was attenuated by growing it in chicken embryo cells for several hundred passages (a “passage” is when you harvest some virus and put it into a fresh batch of cells). It has nothing to do with homeopathy *gagging noise*

Personally, I didn’t have any problems with my smallpox vaccination in graduate school. The oral typhoid vaccine which is a live bacterium didn’t give me any trouble either. The one live immunization that sucked was the BCG – TB vaccine, also a live bacterium – booster in 6th grade in Malaysia. The school nurses gave it a few weeks before mid-year holidays, mine took forever to heal and got a secondary infection from swimming in the sea.

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:39:43 +0000

Serpent: On re-re-reading, the "zombie plague" is an anaerobic virus (which makes no sense), that Morbius uses an oxidizing bacteria to destroy. These are the plague and bacteria he is referring to (but why does he need the bacteria in the vaccine?). So it seems that Morbius has made a live attenuated vaccine -- which means it potentially could revert and cause the emergence of the disease in a vaccinated person. He still screws up in the next paragraph -- which is the meat of my complaint -- stating that ALL vaccines can revert and cause "full blown" diseases. As for your second question, apparently to attenuate a virus, it is injected into a foreign host in the hope that it will mutate enough to become non-dangerous to humans, but still able to cause an immune response. (Wikipedia on Attenuated Vaccines)

By: Kelberon

Kelberon — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:23:10 +0000

This is the person who managed to turn his blood disease (which I don’t think was ever really defined) into a new kind of vampirism. So really, trusting Morbius is just a bad idea to begin with.

By: Your Obedient Serpent

Your Obedient Serpent — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:00:04 +0000

From just this panel, it looks like Morbius is talking about some kind of bacteria as a separate thing from the “zombie plague”. I’d have to pick up the issue to get the full context, though, and that’s one endemic contagion I’d like to avoid.

On another note, I’ve always wondered — just how are the viruses used in Live Attenuated Vaccines “weakened”? Are they somehow altered to inhibit their reproduction? Are they extremely dilute (homeopathic vaccination!)? Do they sit them down on little tiny couches with little-screen TVs and very small video games and never let them exercise?

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:35:28 +0000

The smallpox vaccination falls under the “live attenuated virus” category, in that it’s a live virus, but since it is the vaccinia virus instead of the smallpox virus, it cannot cause actual smallpox.

It is also an innoculation instead of an injection, so it almost always leaves behind a scar — though generally a small nearly unnoticeable one. It i possible to be sensitive to the innoculation and develop a bigger scar — but it’s not the same thing as developing smallpox.

That being said, I was in charge of the smallpox innoculation program at our hospital for the last year of my Air Force term and secondary skin infections were fairly common as people were afraid of touching the innoculated area at all and didn’t do a good job of keeping it clean.

By: Dr Archeville

Dr Archeville — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:20:37 +0000

The zombie bacteria from MARVEL ZOMBIES does seem to have a mind of its own (some of the more recent comics showed a sort of hive mind among the zombies, directed by the bacteria itself), so perhaps perhaps even the smallest fragment of it /can/ cause full-blown infection.

By: Carl

Carl — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:00:59 +0000

It’s possible to have a bad reaction to a vaccine without it being the disease protected against.

The smallpox vaccine is a unique case, in that it’s a live virus but not the smallpox virus. It’s a closely related poxvirus that confers cross-immunity. Rarely someone does get a bad rash, of course. I’m not a physician, but I’d imagine it’s also possible for the injection site to get infected-Doctor Scott?

By: Judith Victorious

Judith Victorious — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:43:25 +0000

What about the smallpox vaccine? I knew a guy who claimed to have had a bad reaction to that; he’s got a scar the size of my hand on one shoulder.