Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.

  • takeda@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    11 months ago

    This is what I was thinking when reading the title. That one supposedly was cool, because there was no needle, never seen one in action but I presume there also was no bleeding.

    Yet we don’t see them used today, apparently the biggest reason was that there was a splashback and retrograde follow and then patient’s blood could end up contaminating the nozzle, so basically it was like using the same needle on multiple patients.

    • buddhabound@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      11 months ago

      They’re not cool. They’re fast and good for giving lots of shots in a situation where you need to get a lot of people in a hurry - especially if you’re giving multiple vaccinations at the same time.

      I got one of those used on me in basic training - a place where you need to vaccinate a few thousand people in about 30 minutes. Each one could do 4 shots at a time, and they had them in multiple configurations so you could get up to 4 in each arm for each “injection” station. We stepped through the line, and you got whatever shots you were missing in your records.

      It hurts, like you could imagine a high pressure power washer with a needle-point burst with 4 heads blasting vaccines in your arms. It works, in the machine-like way the military works, and it is highly effective for mass vaccinations. So, I guess it makes it cool, but also it sucks like you’d expect 4-30 vaccines at once would suck.

      • Alto@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Grandpa told me about a guy in basic that jerked when they shot it, absolutely tore open his arm.

        Fuck that, give me the needle. And I fucking hate needles.

      • reflex@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        What do you think about jet injectors?

        That one supposedly was cool

        They’re not cool.

        What a wild ride. 😏