“Engineers Transform Dental Floss Into Needle-Free Vaccine”
July 26th, 2025Mmm hmm. Get a flu vaccine with your forever chemicals:
That nice waxy glide as you floss your teeth? Turns out it could be courtesy of PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that hijacks hormones and is linked to reproductive problems, birth defects, testicular cancer and a host of other diseases.
Sounds great.
Via: Science:
Flossing may be good for more than getting your dentist off your back—one day, it may also protect you from the flu. In an unorthodox approach to needle-free vaccines, researchers have developed a special kind of floss that can deliver proteins and inactive viruses to mice’s gumlines and trigger immune responses that protect against infectious disease, they report today in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
“I had honestly never thought of using floss as a vaccination strategy,” says Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University who was not involved in the work. “The results are quite impressive.”
More: Concerning Amounts of Toxic PFAS “Forever Chemicals” in Tooth Floss and Dental Floss
So we should stock up on every item we use that could be absorbed into our bodies, getting it before all the new, specially-treated versions hit the shelves? We’d better not throw anything away that’s still usable or has usable parts, even if we don’t use it anymore. Maybe we could use it in the future to make something else we need, like making dental floss from heavy-duty sewing thread or one working wind-up clock from two broken ones.
Some people may call me cheap (I am retired engineer, who are notoriously frugal) but I feel I’m just not being stupid and wasteful. I save things that might have a possibility of being useful in the future. It gives a nice feeling when something, that’s been sitting around for a while, can all of a sudden be used to fix/modify something, instead of having to re-buy the thing. These days you often can’t re-buy something because it’s no longer available, or the new version is much poorer. When I do throw something away, often, a while later I find I could have used it (infuriating). This “cheap/frugal/smart” personality type appears opposite to the type that just can’t wait to buy the latest coolest gizzmotronics, clothes, cars, boats, etc…
I had a friend of that type. When I told him I modified my bicycles to be the way I want them, he of course said “Man, you could have gone and bought new ones,” implying that having something new is always better. Seems that type get an adrenaline high when they shop/buy/spend.
My previous comment was in reference to Snowman’s.
So glad to see your comment! I’ve stuck to my frugality despite the slings and arrows from everybody else, even my own family, and have solved many a problem with my homemade, jury-rigged constructions. I wish I could have been a structural engineer, but in my day and place, girls weren’t allowed. I had to promise to become a school teacher in order to be allowed to go to college.
Have you seen the articles online advising people to get rid of their ‘clutter’ and not be a ‘hoarder’, even how to gently persuade a friend or relative to give up their ‘compulsion’? They’re propaganda leading up to “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”