Swine flu gives its survivors supercharged immunity

[Demeter]

http://io9.com/#!5730895/swine-flu-gives-its-survivors-supercharged-immunity-could-create-universal-flu-vaccine

Swine flu gives its survivors supercharged immunity The swine flu pandemic of 2009 was one of the worst flu scares in recent memory, even if its actual effects ended up being relatively moderate. Now something unambiguously good could come of all this: a universal flu vaccine.

As many as sixty million people were infected with the H1N1 virus, although only about 18,000 people are known to have died from the disease. What researchers are now discovering is what swine flu leaves behind: a superpowered immune system with antibodies that can kill off any new flu virus, not just a return of H1N1.

Recent research on nine swine flu survivors revealed that the infection had caused all their immune systems to go into overdrive, creating a huge range of flu antibodies that aren't needed to fight off swine flu but would be very useful if any number of other flu strains tried to invade the subjects' bodies. More common flu strains like the seasonal flu or the very mild flu virus used to create the flu vaccine don't activate this many antibodies, suggesting there's something unusual about H1N1 that triggers this powerful immune response...The power of the H1N1 immune response is extraordinary. According to the researchers, five of the types of antibodies isolated in their research would be enough to fight off all seasonal flu variations, the Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people in the pandemic of 1918, and a potentially deadly bird flu strain known as H5N1.

The researchers say the uniqueness of the swine flu is what triggered this response. The immune system didn't immediately know what to do with the virus, so it started creating lots of different antibodies based on its memory of other flu viruses it had previously encountered. By the time the immune system found the right antibodies to fight off the swine flu, enough had been created to ward off all other influenza variants as well. We don't know yet whether the H1N1 vaccine also transferred these super immunity properties, although that's next on the researchers' to-do list...(According to) Oxford University virus expert Dr. Sarah Gilbert, this could well lead us to a universal flu vaccine, and in the relatively near future, too

[pacalo]

1. Having had what I believe was the swine flu, I'm happy to hear that something

as rewarding as a supercharged immune system resulted from two weeks of misery. Make that almost 3 weeks until my full strength came back.

Edited to add this additional information from another article, which includes the H1N1 virus outbreak in late 2010 to early 2011. The OP's link mentions 2009 only.

Medical experts in the UK, Sweden and Australia have been especially worried about all the new mutated strains of H1N1 that appeared during late 2010 and early 2011. The mortality rate has increased and the new strains are much more deadly than the original strain of the virus. Another concern has been that the newly mutated versions of H1N1 were no longer inhibited by the existing vaccines.

http://www.helium.com/items/2066707-swine-flu-survivors-develop-supercharged-immunity

:thumbsup:

[DCKit]

2. As long as that "super-charged immunity" doesn't come packaged with "auto-immune disorders"...

I'm happy.

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. So, if we got swine flu can we go somewhere to get tested to find out

if we have enough antibodies to make the vaccine irrelevant?

[tblue37]

4. In a classic science fiction novel entitled _No Blade of Grass_

researchers develop a way to inoculate crops against known diseases that might devastate them. But because they have killed off all the known crop-destroying diseases, they end up leaving the field wide open for a superbug that wipes out all plants that belong to the grass family--including rice, trees, etc. It turns out that the superbug was competing with all those other diseases, and once there is no longer any competition for it, the superbug runs rampant.

With so much of the world's greenery destroyed, civilization is destroyed. Food crops become almost nonexistent. Only such crops as potatoes, that are not grass, survive.

Of course it becomes a Mad Max type violent dystopia, as people compete for the scarce food resources and all governments fall apart.

In another SF story, scientists find a way to make it possible for people to eat and digest grass, thus "solving" the problem of hunger in a world where population growth is getting out of hand. A group of astronauts return to earth after a longish mission, only to find that people and other animals have gone extinct and the earth is a barren desert. Once people can use grass as a food source, all plants in the grass family, including trees, etc., are eaten by the exploding human population.

astronauts realize with dismay that human beings have "completely eaten the earth." (Of course they didn't "eat the earth," but they did devour everything on the earth that made it possible for humans and other animals to survive.

I do worry that wiping out "all known flu viruses" might leave the field open for an unknown flu-type virus that is actually more virulent than any we have yet seen(including the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 18 million worldwide--even more people than the bubonic plague of the 14th century that wiped out 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe. I am no scientist. I don't know if it is even possible for such a superbug to emerge when less virulent ones are wiped out, but I do worry about such blowback whenever we hurry into such technological and scientific solutions without considering all possible outcomes.

I am such a nervous Nelly.