New Study Finds Flu Virus "Paralyzes" Immune System 84
mmmscience writes with this excerpt from Examiner.com: "A study coming out of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found that the influenza virus manages to dysregulate the immune system, allowing other infections to thrive in the body. This discovery, coming at an opportune time as the world battles the new H1N1 flu outbreak, may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals."
Mortality rates and the flu (Score:5, Informative)
They speak generally about "the flu", but then use the extreme outliers of the Spanish flu of 1918, and the worst fears of the H1N1 virus, as their examples.
My understanding was that the flu virus hits the immuno-compromised much harder -- the young and the elderly being the most at risk, with it being a day or two off work for people with normal immune systems.
H1N1 is getting a lot of attention primarily because it was outside of the norm for the flu, hitting healthy individuals hard in Mexico, although not repeating that behaviour elsewhere.
NOT NEWS (Score:5, Informative)
May I be the first one to suggest that this is not news?
Most viruses combat the immune system... especially the innate immune system, which is largely responsible for the cytokine response. They have to, or the infection would never progress to clinical stages.
Influenza is not an exception, and there is a mountain of literature about flu's ability to suppress innate immunity. There's hundreds of papers about influenza's ability to supress NF-kappaB, type I interferon, etc...
Re:Was it really the flu? (Score:1, Informative)
This offers me a bit of incite, especially with my powers of wild speculation!
"Incite" and "insight" are two different words. You used the wrong one.
(Bonus tip: though "site", "cite", and "sight" are all different words, "insite" isn't a word.)
Re:Mortality rates and the flu (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, this could be Nobel quality research and it would be hard to tell, but I'm not getting all warm and fuzzies here....
Study Very Preliminary (Score:4, Informative)
My point being is that the potential indication of the research needs to be picked up and validated with a more comprehensive study.
Re:Mortality rates and the flu (Score:2, Informative)
For the record... (Score:2, Informative)
...I work in an IT department of a hospital in Northern California. I don't wear the stupid masks, I haven't had any shots and I've been regularly going around to every possible department/area of the hospital during this whole flue scare for (and for the last eight months). I don't have the Swine Flu or whatever they call it these days. Actually so far as I've heard no one else I work with has caught it either. I hope everybody can start to relax about this!