Talk:Artificial induction of immunity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at the doctor's mess.
Unassessed	rated as Unassessed-Class on the assessment scale
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the assessment scale.

Artificial induction of immunity was a good article candidate, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. Once the objections listed below are addressed, the article can be renominated. You may also seek a review of the decision if you feel there was a mistake. Date of review: No date specified. Please edit template call function as follows: {{FailedGA|insert date in any format here}}

Which?

This is a working title. One might say induction of prior immunity, or medical induction of immunity, the key point in a title being that it is immunity produced by means other than waiting to catch the disease and hoping to survive it.

What

1. The unique element of the article is to tie variolation and vaccination

and modern immunisation into one process, with the (potential?) artificial production of antibodies as still part of that process.

1. Providing a bit of context eg germ theory etc is a secondary intention.

it doesn't seem to me an article that should go into detail about the individual processes, otherwise it could get very long and duplicate them.

Why (separate)

The argument against merging it with one or several of the articles linked to is that it has that unique element that is not provided by the other separate articles.

Dive in... Midgley 13:45, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

Contents 1 Article name 2 Onesimus and Boston 3 Readability Edits 4 A malapropism unless we use Roman Numerals 5 GA failure

[edit] Article name

• I'll await to see how this article develops, but a change of name is likely indicated. This is supposed to be an umbrella article which introduces a number of topics covered more extensively in their own articles. It is a sort of mini-subproject within the project of clinical medicine and just as that has a name that people would not immediate know to search for (Wikipedia:WikiProject Clinical medicine), nor does this need a "perfect" name.
  • However whilst this article name tries to distinguish itself from "naturally acquired immunity" (following infection from the native disease), would a better name be "Medically induced immunity" or just "Induced immunity", else "Stimulated immunity" ?
• Whilst there is a Category:Vaccination (which rightly does not include variolation), the next level up is Category:Immunology which seems too high a level (autoimmune disease have no direct link to stimulating disease immunity - PS I note Variolation is not in this category either). Clearly these categories wont work as they are and either:
  1. A new category is needed (ugh - each vaccine really does not need yet another category), or
  2. Category:Vaccination is renamed to make it a little more encompassing, e.g. Category:Induced immunity, that would allow variolation etc to be included within it ?
     • Thereagain, who wants germ theory being directly categorised under a vaccination category (might as well have every single microbiology article included too).
  • So perhaps a new category of our own would allow us to select the appropriate inclusion criteria ? David Ruben ^Talk 01:02, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

This is all eminently sensible. I'm going to sit on my hands so far as this article goes, for a while, I believe it has some slight merit, but it will be better if others take it out of the rough. I suppose an assertion whcih could be made would be that there are several ways of articially inducing immunity ... which might make a category ... I'm not sure how comfortably the members would sit next to each other or how useful it would be to readers. This article's content-based name should really be Artificial induction of specific immunity which is clearly not as snappy as one would like. Midgley 01:35, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Time to revisit the name I should admit I'm happy with the existing one, but would put forward no effort to keep it. This is a stable article now, and evolved as they should, it really ought to do for good article status I think, or at least be reviewed for it. "Therapeutically induced immunity" is one reasonable title, adding "specific" as th epenultimate word would leave it long, but correct. Are there any others worth considering? Midgley 02:23, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Onesimus and Boston

I meant accounts other than the one about Lady Motagu, but agree that was a superfluous expression. Onesimus is noted in the NIH on-line presentation on variolation cited already. Cotton Mather claimed to own him. Midgley 05:17, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Readability Edits

Hi -- just FYI, I've just made several large (but hopefully content-sparing) edits just for things like grammar, flow, and readability. Haven't done the last section yet -- need to go to bed.

Regarding the title -- I like the title "Therapeutic induction of immunity", as it's more specific and makes some reference to the purpose of the procedure. Still a mouthful, though. Scot ^→Talk 10:20, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

That seems an adequately good title. Therapeutically induced immunity is one word shorter and a little tighter. Midgley 11:00, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

By the way, I love the picture of the platypus -- nice touch! Scot ^→Talk 02:15, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A malapropism unless we use Roman Numerals

In teh introductory paragraph:-

"a widening number "

IIII is indeed wider than III but I think in MMVI we can have "a widening range", or "an increasing number", or at a pinch "more and more". Pick one, someone. Midgley 02:26, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GA failure

Reasons :

• This is a historical overview, and an introduction to a collection of detailed articles on the main topics. – doesn’t make any sense in an encyclopaedic article.
• No lead, see WP:LEAD.
• Anthrax is now known to be caused by a bacterium, and rabies is known to be caused by a virus. The microscopes of the time could reasonably be expected to show bacteria, but imaging of viruses had to wait until the development of electron microscopes with their greater resolving power in the 20th century. – doesn’t go with there rest of the text in the Germ theory section.
• The article doesn’t flow … there is no logic in the section order.
• Sounds POV in some sentences.
• Needs more citations for this kind of subject.

Lincher 14:58, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

The germ theory section points out that the people developing that theory could _see_ Anthrax bacteria, but had to _infer_ the unseen Rabies agent, and that going from that to a vaccine against it, on the basis of the germ theory, was rather clever. Later, one of the demonstrations of correctness was that the virus could be seen with increased magnification with the EM. Perhaps it could be made more clear. My feeling remains that htis should not be a long article. Midgley 21:48, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Section order ... I don't follow that argument. The sections follow the chronological order of development of understanding of, and artificial induction of, immunity against disease. What other order could they be in? I think that criticism is entirely mistaken. Midgley 21:48, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

References: There could be more, but each main article has many, and repeating them here is not ideal. Midgley 21:48, 2 June 2006 (UTC)