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.
Comment on Tattoo Ink Moves Through the Body, Killing Immune Cells and Weakening Vaccine Response
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
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?
bonenode@piefed.social 2 days ago
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
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.
EtherWhack@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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 analog.
voodooattack@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
bookmeat@lemmynsfw.com 2 days ago
You’re freaking out over over a single study. This is the beginning of a more comprehensive investigation. Chill your cornhole 🙂
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
And yet, this single study has already pushed through the news cycle in multiple directions, thanks to its dangerously deceptive headline.
It doesn’t matter if it’s gets disproven in later studies, the damage has been done.
frongt@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
What damage?
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Just use pigs.
Basically the same thing as a human (except for the opposable thumbs, which explains us eating them), but smarter and cleaner on average.
Horsey@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
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.
olafurp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
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.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It’s the size of the animal that’s important here. I’m aware that mice can sometimes have useful biomechanical similarities to humans, but this is the wrong animal to use in this case. Pigs would have been much much better.
Tattooing is a delicate operation that requires precision, even using different pressures between male and female human skin, and that does not scale well at all for an animal that is 100x smaller than a human.
bonenode@piefed.social 1 day ago
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.
grey_maniac@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
If only there was a place where humans who have a tendency to get tattoos are in cages for an exrended period of time with a relatively consistent, trackable food intake, and constantly tracked behaviour. Humans who might even be motivated by privileges to volunteer for such studies.
Horsey@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’d do it for a Nico tattoo
_lilith@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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