A man blowing his nose into a tissue. Picture by UBC Risk Management Services
Don’t you just hate catching the flu when exams and holidays are just around the corner? Don’t be disheartened, but flu season is back!
Flu shot advertisement. Picture by n0sylla87 on Flickr.
Annually, around this time of the year, we see advertisements for flu shots. Also, for the first time, flu clinics are offering free vaccination for children aged between six months and five years. The University of British Columbia (UBC) is offering its students with free influenza vaccinations so if you haven’t got it yet, prepare yourselves by getting vaccinated.
So to start with, how does our body react to the influenza viruses? During the fight against the flu, two types of immune cells are at work, B and T cells. B cells make the antibodies which interfere with the viruses’ entry into the cells. But if they do enter the body, the T cells recognize the infected cells and kill them. But there is flaw to our immune system; it only develops response when it encounters a particular virus. This process is time consuming; so while the antibodies are being made, the virus spreads throughout. This is where the vaccines come in. Vaccines protect people from the virus, making the antibodies in advance by having the B cells that encounter the protein on the virus. So when vaccinated people get infected, the B cells quickly release their antibodies.
The following clip simplifies how viruses enter our body.
The limitation of the current vaccines is that they only protect against the flu viruses of the matching protein, so if the virus evolves to a different shape, the antibodies do not recognize it. Therefore, we need to get our flu shots every year. Scientists predict the dominant strain of the viruses each year to create new vaccines.
Dr. Nabel, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and other experts predicted that present vaccines will be replaced by longer lasting vaccines. They said that the goal is to get the “shots when you’re young, and then boosters later in life” and that they are not that far away from reaching it. If they are to create this universal vaccine, they would have to attack the part of the virus that changes little every year. Now, Dr. Wilson of the Scripps Research Institute discovered a new antibody that can slither onto the groove of the surface protein of the virus. It attaches to a wide range of flu viruses and they found out that the grooves cannot transform much because the viruses attach to the host cells here. So, further expanding on the Dr. Wilson’s discoveries, Dr. Nabel developed a vaccine that produces new antibodies in humans. Now the problem from developing the perfect influenza vaccine is to get the body to make lots of these antibodies, but we are getting closer!
-Minji Yoo-
