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2003 DEC 3 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Viruses, bacteria, eukaryotic parasites, cancer cells, agricultural pests, and other inconvenient animates have the unfortunate feature to escape from selection pressures that are meant to control them.
Chemotherapy, antiviral drugs, or antibiotics fail because their targets do not hold still, but evolve resistance. A major problem for developing vaccines is that microbes are variable and mutate to escape from immune responses. The fundamental question is the following: If a genetically diverse population of replicating organisms is challenged with a selection pressure that has the potential to eradicate it, what is the probability that this population will produce escape mutants?
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