tagged w/ Russian Flu
-
Older people maybe immune to swine flu thanks to past research for a type of H1N1 virus in 1977, commonly known as the “Russian flu,” which spread across the world, and at the the time infecting people under 25 at much higher rates than their elders, who had been exposed to similar viruses in the ’40s and ’50s. The U.S research showed 70 percent of the students fell ill at a high school in Cheyenne, Wyoming, while their teachers proved immune.
Leonard Mermel, an i disease specialist at Rhode Island Hospital, suggests the current flu virus could be similar enough to that ’70s strain that older people could again find themselves immune to a new virus.
“It might be that the H1N1 circulating now (swine-origin influenza virus) has enough antigenic similarity to related H1N1 influenza strains of the past to protect older individuals exposed to them previously,” Mermel wrote in a letter to the journal The Lancet.Older people maybe immune to swine flu thanks to past research for a type of H1N1... more
-
