Universal Flu Vaccine "Blueprint" Discovered

minty3 writes "Scientists say they used the pandemic as a 'natural experiment' to discover how the body's immune system builds resistance to the flu. The research, published in the journal Nature Medicine, showed how certain immune cells helped some avoid the severe illness. 'Our findings suggest that by making the body produce more of this specific type of CD8 T cell, you can protect people against symptomatic illness,' said study leader Professor Ajit Lalvani, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London, in a statement. 'This provides the blueprint for developing a universal flu vaccine.'"

Re:I still won't get the shot

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that was me too. But then on year 11 I got the flu & couldn't get out of bed for a damn week. I prefer my sick days to be a little less sick so now I get the shot. I'll let you know in about 6 more years if the shot works out better for me, but so far no adverse reactions and no flu.

Re:Or it will accelerate the evolutionary pressure

[jamesh]

Yes, its a shame we didn't learn our lesson after the huge pandemics of vaccine resistant polio. Clearly we should let people continue to die of the flu to prevent it from possibly evolving into something harmful. Or maybe if we just kill everyone who gets the flu we can breed flu resistant humans and finally eradicate this deadly disease.

You can't really draw a parallel between polio and the flu. The flu has a bunch of non-human hosts that it can jump between. It will happily sit around in the bird/pig/whatever population until it mutates into something that can infect humans again. And birds go everywhere.

AFAIK, polio is for humans (or primates at least) only

Re:How quickly can you bury this?

[RespekMyAthorati]

Germany, Denmark and Finland have functional safety nets with relatively high taxes, while at the same time maintaining economies that make that of the U.S. look like a sad joke.
On the other hand, they don't have expensive spy technology used to spy on their own people, or multi-billion dollar fighter planes that don't work.
Hell, they can't even afford to run two middle eastern wars without getting trillions of dollars in debt to China!

Americans are so much better off.