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| twesterm said:
-edit- And I admit I'm pretty much ignorant on the situation since I only heard about it in passing on the news and from what I've seen in this thread. Torillian seems to know what he's talking about though. |
I've had to do a couple reports on it for Biochem classes. Unfortunately I don't know exactly how vaccines work. I had thought we made vaccines each flu season with different N and H strains to try and catch what's the most prevalent, and if we knew that this newest "pandemic" was coming from the H1N1 strain then we should be able to prepare and vaccinate for it.
The issue is that if you don't have a vaccine you really can't get rid of the virus, all you can do is use anti-viral drugs to slow down the virus until your immune system is able to put it into remission.
With all that, like you said, even if there isn't a vaccine, this isn't something amazingly deadly such as the Spanish Flu, and even if it was, we are now much better equpped medically than we were back then. Some people will die from it, but people die from many diseases that we don't even think about. It is unfortunate, but it's just the way things are.
edit: thinking about it, perhaps if enough changed genetically and it is an influenza that has structure meant to attack swine or birds, and it now has the H1N1 proteins to be able to attack humans then maybe that would be why vaccination isn't an option.
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