General discussions about "science" itself
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In the study the longest they waited after tattooing the mouse before giving the vaccine was 2 months.
They made some connections with people that had tattoos for a much longer time. But I can't tell how meaningful those connections are.
This is well outside of my field.
Edit:
Also, it sounds like the tattooed mice were less responsive to the covid vaccine but more responsive to the Influenza vaccine.
... This is the internet. You can always be like the rest and pretend you know everything and are multi discaplined, instead of taking the proper, less fun, honest route.
Why make this comment encouraging bad behavior? This feels like injected negativity for negativity sake. Idk man, be the change you want to see in your community.
I agree with you in sentiment, however; I believe the comment you're replying to was intended as a joke.
There are far too many humans with tattoos that could have been researched extensively, but they chose mice. Mice do not have the same kind of skin density as humans, and I doubt a tattoo artist or researcher would have the talent to tattoo a mouse's skin.
There's just so many things wrong with using mice in this study. So many bad ratios with the size of the animal. I mean, for fuck's sake, tattoo artists already practice on pig skin. Pigs would have been a better analogue, but honestly, they should have picked the millions of humans who were already tattooing themselves.
Of course, if they did that, they wouldn't get the same result and be able to push this sensationalist science news title, now would they? Except, in this case, we've gone from research paper to straight to sensationalist news title in one step! Just let the institute PR department push the narrative for you, without having to wait for that pesky news cycle to crawl through the telephone game.
Human subjects are crazy to work with for a few reasons
Laboratory mice literally live 5 to a cage with almost no diet variability, in a controlled environment. Yes shit does happen with research mice, but it’s something that is easy to control overall.
And yet, we manage to have hundreds of thousands of studies written about humans with human subjects. This sounds like a boatload of excuses that could be summed up as "science is hard". Sure, it's hard, but it's better than putting out a flawed study that can't scale properly.
Sure, the study would be best if we did a randomised double blind study on a sample of 100 people that all are going to get a tattoo anyway but that doesn't make the mouse study irrelevant.
Mice and humans, although very different in appearance have biomechanics that are very similar. For every human study you could make a 20 mouse studies with the same funding so you could do a lot more exploration.
This study found something, notably that ink in the blood affected the immune system. This just means that future studies are needed like injecting people with tattoo ink and blood samples diagnosis after tattoo to see how much ink is in the blood. If confirmed this will push tattoo ink manufacturers to develop a new ink that eliminates the effect and we can all enjoy safer more effective tattooing.
This study is not flawed, it's pushing human knowledge forward like it always does.
You don't need to sum it up as science is hard but also as science is expensive. They might simply not have gotten funding for something as that.
You are generally not wrong but where can you find people who are tattooed, not yet vaccinated, but happy to get vaccinated for this study? It is wrong to say this definitely works the same in humans, but it is not easy to setup such a study.
Within a single city, hundreds of people get tattoos each day. A large cross-section of those probably haven't refreshed their COVID vaccine, but only because they haven't gotten around to it.
I think it's more the news article that's upselling it and with it being "groundbreaking", it is likely only at the initial stages.
Mice are usually the first phase are they do have a similar immune response (systemically), have a fast metabolism and quick to mature. They're also clones, which helps eliminate external factors that could contribute to what they're studying. More or less, mice are just a quicker litmus test to just show that something is possible and if it warrants a study on a closer analogue.
Unless we dissect the original paper in its entirety, I don’t think we should dismiss their methods out of hand.
I’ll reserve judgement until peer-reviews can confirm or rebuke the results.
The full paper is here and, as usual, it's hardly anything and decontextualized in order to get a publishable result.
This one is so bad that it doesn't use established baselines or do any form of statistical analysis on the results instead opting for their own "baseline" measurements using very small sample sizes. It also plays a smoke and mirrors game where it shows a result for short term immunological response and then uses that to insinuate the 'slightly reduced but still likely well within the error of the poor control' long term effects are worth noting.
Other major flaws:
At best it's a very poorly communicated and poorly designed experiment but I suspect that's due to it result hunting.
Why not be a professional scientist by:
- adding "in mice" to the title;
Similarly, human immune cells previously exposed to ink also showed a weakened response to vaccination.
In a Petri dish!
followed by a chronic phase that can persist for years.
how many years? am I doomed for life because what I did to my body when I was 18 :(
I think if these effects were universal and as serious as the paper makes out,, we'd have noticed them waaay sooner.
To be fair, it’s possible it has been a significant factor to weakend immune systems all along; it was just now that the connection/link with tattoo ink was identified. Not a scientist obviously, just spitballing.
And yet things like asbestos, lead, and smoking all took way longer than you'd expect (given they were a lot more universal).
All three of your examples were known to cause ill effects for centuries. The ancient Romans knew the asbestos mines were killing their slaves. Their overuse during the 20th century was not due to ignorance but corporate lobbying and political complacency.
The lobbyist play is to fund counter-studies to sow FUD even though the scientific consensus that [X Bad] is well established, because it gives an easy out for bought out politicians. However the tatoo lobby is certainly not one that I expect to be have the pull to fund FUD scientific studies to delay legislation, and if they are doing that it should be pretty easy to point to.
And yet humans have been tattooing themselves since the dawn of recorded history - significantly longer than any of those other things were around before their harm became evident.
Yes but that applies to almost everything you did when you were 18.
I got a tattoo on my leg when I was 17.
36 now and I’m the past year it’s gotten ridiculously itchy, bumpy and my skin is rejecting the ink and spitting it up in little spots.
The anti tatto crowd licking their lips over this one.
It's just tiresome to hear these hyperventilating articles without any real measure of the degree of risk or long term consequences.
Honestly, I think that shitty science reporting like this is fuel for the normie to science skeptic pipeline.
how low? weakened by how much?
I think they leave that out on purpose so they can make these sensational claims… if your immune system takes a 0.02% hit, nobody would care
Ah pretty interesting. Good to clarify that its in mice, not humans.
The study found that tattooed mice produced significantly lower levels of antibodies after vaccination. This effect is likely due to the impaired function of immune cells that remain associated with tattoo ink for long periods. Similarly, human immune cells previously exposed to ink also showed a weakened response to vaccination
"Human immune cells", not cells in humans.
That's not to say this doesn't happen in humans, it very well may. It's intriguing research, but it's still only demonstrated in mice. Important to always keep that in mind until we get better information (which this research is at least leading us to).
Lots of stuff happens in mice (or pigs, or a petri dish) and we find doesn't replicate to homo sapiens.
It's also important to keep on mind that the burden of proof is on something to prove it is safe, not that something is unsafe. It happening to human cells in mice would have me assume it happens to human cells in humans until proven otherwise (that's the null hypothesis in this situation). But also I don't have a tattoo or any interest in getting one so I'm not too bothered by this.
Humans have been tattooing each other for over 5000 years. I would argue that it's not really a case of "they need to be proven to be safe". That ship has sailed. If they are unsafe, we should know, but I think the burden of proof has definitely shifted on tattoos given their extensive history without obvious negative repercussion
What you're missing is that the ingredients of tattoo ink have changed dramatically in the last 100 or so years.
Prior to then tattoo inks were made mostly with soot or black ash mixed with plant oils.
Nowadays the inks are almost entirely synthetic, sourced from the same companies that make industrial paint, and have been tested and some found to contain carbon black nanoparticles, Texanol, BHT, 2-phenoxyethanol, and various other things that are confirmed (or reasonably suspected) to be toxic and which definitely wouldn't be in historical inks.
The proof should be entirely on the suppliers and administrators (tattooists) to confirm their ink and tattoos are safe, not the users. Yet their regulations are very lax in most countries, requiring no pharmaceutical testing even though they are injected into people's skin.
Some refs:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25833640/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38387033/
https://theconversation.com/whats-in-tattoo-ink-my-teams-chemical-analysis-found-ingredients-that-arent-on-the-label-and-could-cause-allergies-22481
thats why some people get a rash at the tattoo sites, or it triggers shingles. make sense since macrophages clean up melanin pigment produced by post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, a brown spot after a severe pimple or something.
Well, then. That could explain a lot about why I always feel like I'm dying.
I have the opposite problem, my immune system is in overdrive. I should get a tattoo to reign it in.
What is your opinion on how much this applies to humans?
I spent a career in translational medicine (research). Its not a perfect 1:1 but most of the time these models are very good.
in mice.
I should schedule a new tattoo appointment.
would it be possible to solve this problem by making different inks? or would any ink that doesn't have this problem just inherently be non-permanent
Not a biologist but I believe the latter. If the ink could be broken down by the macrophages in your lymph nodes it would likely be broken down in its intended location in your skin too, as there are lyphatic capillaries and vessels throughout our skin.
