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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 13 2016, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the atchoo! dept.

Apparently influenza A flus come in two main varieties, the H1 and the H7. When you had your first flu when you were young you got good defenses against that subfamily according to researchers from the University of Arizona and UCLA. This explains why sometimes old and sick people can weather an influenza better than young and healthy people. This insight might have important implications in case of a pandemic.

The research team studied two avian-origin influenza A ("bird flu") viruses, H5N1 and H7N9, each of which already has caused hundreds of spillover cases of severe illness or death in humans. Both strains are of global concern because they might at some point gain mutations that allow them not only to readily jump from birds into humans, but also spread rapidly between human hosts.

Analyzing data from every known case of severe illness or death from influenza caused by these two strains, the researchers discovered that whichever human influenza strain a person happened to be exposed to during his or her first infection with flu virus as a child determines which novel, avian-origin flu strains they would be protected against in a future infection. This effect of "immunological imprinting" appears to be exclusively dependent on the very first exposure to flu virus encountered in life — and difficult to reverse.

[...] In their latest paper, Worobey and co-authors not only show that there is a 75 percent protection rate against severe disease and 80 percent protection rate against death if patients had been exposed to a matched virus as children, but also that one can take that information and make predictions about H5N1, H7N9 and other potential causes of future pandemics.

"If either of these viruses were to successfully jump from birds into humans, we now know something about the age groups that they would be hit the hardest," Worobey said, adding that efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine hinge on such insights because "such a vaccine would likely target the same conserved protein motifs on the virus surface that underlie this age-specific pattern."

https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/birth-year-predicts-odds-if-flu-pandemic-were-strike


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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:15PM

    by ledow (5567) on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:15PM (#426306) Homepage

    Being ill as a child is necessary to not be ill later.

    News at 11, people.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2016, @07:32PM (#426311)

    Exactly. I let my kids play in the dirt, get sick from others, etc. It sounds like bad parenting, but it builds their immune system early in life. They very rarely get sick now that they're grown up, unlike other parents that keep their kids in a sterile environment and wonder why they get sick so often.