Hopefully you don’t know much about chlamydia except that you don’t want it. The most common sexually transmitted infection in the world is no joke – although it can be cured with the right medical attention, most people who have chlamydia show no symptoms. It can cause serious, permanent damage to a woman’s reproductive system, making it difficult or impossible to get pregnant.
Luckily, scientists are hard at work to perfect a vaccine that will prevent the STI.
According to the study published in Science, researchers recreated a previous study on chlamydia that was done in the 1960s done on humans, except this time they used mice.
In the experiment, they gave the mice either live or dead chlamydia bacteria and later injected them again with live chlamydia to see how they’d respond. They found results similar to the 1960s group of humans – the group of mice that were given dead bacteria were way more likely to be infected than those who were given live doses. This is actually good – it means that the body reacted to the killed bacteria, which allowed them to try to play with the response the body was having with it and turn it into a more positive one.
Don’t set up an appointment with your doc to get this vaccine (that might be effective as a simple nasal spray!) just yet. It’s going to take years before this is available, if at all. Cosmopolitan.com spoke with senior author of the study, Ulrich H. Von Andrian, who said, “Before we can test the vaccine on humans, we have to make sure there aren’t toxicity issues and that it receives FDA approval. After that, we’d have to be able to give it to someone at a young age when they didn’t have the disease yet, because if you gave it to someone who already had chlamydia, it might not work. You’d also have to follow these patients to see if they were less likely to develop chlamydia than a control group and that could take years to understand all of that.”
Von Andrian also added that it would cost “millions and millions of dollars” to test the vaccine, so at this point, it’s a matter of “finding someone who’s willing to take the risk and finance it and see if it works.”
Any takers?
Game Changer: Scientists Are Working On A Vaccine For The World's Most Common STI
