Author: Trisha Leigh Zeigenhorn / Source: did you know?
If you want my opinion, the next epidemic that threatens millions of lives isn’t going to be ebola or one of its truly terrible cousins. It’s going to be a twist on the annual flu.
There’s precedent for this: in the early 20th century, the Spanish flu killed up to 100 million people across the globe.
What’s even scarier is there’s no way to predict when another mutated flu virus will rear its ugly head.“A major pandemic like the one we saw in 1918 has the potential to kill large numbers of people and shut down the world’s economy,” Michael Worobey, one of the two senior authors of a study on the subject, noted.
What’s less apparent is who this future pandemic might spare, but scientists have recently unearthed an…unusual theory.
According to researchers from the University of Arizona in Tucson and the University of California, Los Angeles, the year you were born could have some influence on whether or not you survive the coming plague.
Up until now, it was believed that your previous exposure to a flu virus didn’t have any effect on your ability to recover from a new flu virus – particularly ones that can jump from animals into humans. However, when the team studied two avian-origin influenza A viruses, both of which have caused severe illness and death in humans, they discovered that the human influenza strain a person was exposed to during their first flu infection determines which new, avian flu strain they’ll be protected against in the future.
They’re calling the effect “immunological imprinting.” It appears to be totally dependent on a person’s very first flu exposure – and it’s difficult to reverse or affect with immunizations.
When a person is first exposed to a…
The post Your Birth Year Can Predict Your Likelihood of Surviving a Flu Pandemic appeared first on FeedBox.