Nothing to sneeze at –
Get your flu shot if you haven’t yet.
Beth Mole -Dec 12, (7:) ******************************************************************************************************************** (UTC UTC) ************ **************************
Flu activity has been elevated since the start of November and is only expected to continue climbing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports inits latest flu update. That’s a few weeks earlier than in past years.
Flu season in the United States can ramp up in the fall and peak anywhere between December and March, then drag itself out as late as May. In the last years, flu most often ramped up in December and January and peaked in February. But for this winter, the CDC says there’s a 55 percent chance the flu will peak in December based on activity so far.
While this season may peak on the early side, the most unusual aspect is that it’s being driven by an influenza B strain. This isn’t necessarily good or bad, just unusual.
Type B is one of three types of influenza viruses that infect humans — A, B, and the very mild C. ( There’s a fourth type, D, but so far it mainly seems to infect cattle.) Most flu seasons are driven by type A viruses, the kind you’ve probably heard about the most. Type A viruses are identified by numbered Hs and Ns, like H1N1 and H3N2.
The Hs and Ns refer to hemagglutinin (Ha or H) and neuraminidase (Na or N), respectively, which are both viral molecules that hang on the outside of viral particles. Basically, Ha helps viral particles invade human cells in the respiratory tract and Na allows newly formed viruses to burst out of human cells and invade more (for more details, see this explainer. But, because they jut out from a viral particle, Ha and Na also help our immune systems identify flu virus. This essentially triggers an arms race.
Type A viruses can swiftly mutate and rearrange the molecular makeup of Has and Nas, making them difficult if not impossible for our immune systems to recognize. That’s where the numbering comes in. There are (Ha subtypes and******************************************************************************************************************************** (Na subtypes known, creating********************************************************************************************** possible combinations. To make things more interesting, type A viruses are promiscuous — they infect humans, many mammals, and birds. This gives them a lot of opportunities to swap their Has and Nas and come up with exciting combinations. Occasionally, extremely dangerous combinations can spark pandemics, such as the deadly
H1N1 “swine flu”that spread worldwide in the – 2017 flu season. The ever-morphing nature of type A viruses is the main reason why flu can be so deadly and why we need to get different flu shots every season. Type B viruses — which are dominating this flu season so far — don’t do any of this. Their Has and Nas genetically “drift” relatively slowly. Type B viruses also only infect humans and, oddly enough, seals, giving them fewer opportunities to mingle and rearrange themselves. Since type B viruses were first spotted in the s, they have never been linked to a pandemic.
Instead of a soup of numbers, Hs, and Ns, type B viruses are mainly identified by their lineage. In the s, geneticists noted that type B viruses seemed to have split intotwo distinct, evolutionary lineagesbased on studying their Has. They dubbed the lineages B / Victoria for a reference stainisolated in Australiaand B / Yamagata after a reference strain isolated in Japan.
Type B viruses typically account for about a third of all of the flu disease burden. For many years, researchers had the impression that they were relatively mild flu strains, given their slow evolution and limited host-hopping. But recent studies have found that they can cause severe disease and sometimes causethe bulk of flu-related deathsin a season. Type B viruses are also detected most often in children.
Otherwise, very small samplings of the type A viruses popping up this season — H1N1 and H3N2 viruses — suggest that they’re nearly all similar to the A / Brisbane / 06 / (H1N1) pdm – like virus and the A / Kansas / / (H3N2) –like virus, which are both covered by this year flu vaccine.
Get vaccinated
However, as CDC’s Pauley noted to Ars, “there is relatively little laboratory data on the characterization of viruses collected since October, so it’s not possible to make conclusions about how well the vaccine will work at this time. “
There have been some concernthat the flu vaccine recommended for the (**************************************************** flu season in the Southern Hemisphereincludes different H3N2 and B / Victoria lineage viruses than the
Regardless of how well-matched this year vaccine will be to circulating flu viruses, getting a flu shot is critical, Pauley notes to Ars. The vaccine can spare you entirely and prevent disease spread or, at least, dampen the severity of the infection, potentially saving lives. “Flu vaccination is the best way to reduce the risk from flu and its challenging serious complications,” Pauley says.
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