Torillian said:
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. |
I'm not too up with this topic any more but i think i can offer some answers. Firstly i've tried to track down what are the most common serotypes of Influenza A but with no success.
H1N1 strains have been found in humans and been the cause of pandemics before (e.g Spanish Flu), and although endemic in pigs it may not have been a common serotype in humans in recent times.
Even so the H and N designation is only part of the story. We could create a H1N1 vaccine this year and a new kind of H1N1 virus could present next year which is resistant to the vaccine. This is due to minor changes in the H and N.
Furthermore the H1N1 designation doesn't tell us directly how dangerous the disease is but it can tell us something about it's infectious potential. If year after year we get H2N3 and minor variations on that theme, as a population our immune systems get used to it (our immune systems are smarter than vaccines). If all of a sudden H1N1 is introduced into a population where it hasn't existed for years, our immune systems don't know how to deal with it, more people get infected and spread it around.
Finally, let's say there is an outbreak of H1N1 this year, many people get infected but not many people die. Then 6 months from now in the southern hemisphere there is an outbreak of H1N1 and millions of people die, what's the difference? While they are both H1N1, the virus has other proteins in it's structure (besides H and N) which determine how dangerous it is to humans. If one or more of these proteins change, for example by mixing with other kinds of influenza virus, then all of a sudden we can find ourselves with a form of influenza that can both spread rapidly and have a high mortality rate.
Sorry this ended up so long but i hope it clarifies some things but don't take it as gospel as it's a long time since i studied this stuff.
