P.C. Shannon

Listen people, the avian flu is coming. Hopefully later rather than sooner, but there will be a pandemic. And it’s gonna be bad. I’m not going to scare you with apocalyptic predictions, but please, get a flu shot.

As far as anyone can remember, I personally have only ever had the flu once. Never had it as a kid, never got it in college, even when my roommate in the dorm did. I finally caught it in New York City at the end of 2003. Caroline got it too, which was surprising because she’d had her flu shot that year. The injection only protects you against the three most common strains from the previous year, and that year, a strain of influenza called Fujian was very common. Still, the shot provides some generalized protection against all types of flu, so Caroline had a slightly better time of it than I did.

As a microbiology student in college, I realized that one possible reason that I never got in flu in spite of obvious exposure was that I had a mutation that made me immune. In a large enough population, there are always individuals with a natural immunity to a given disease; there are some people in the world who are immune to HIV, for example.

I also knew the particulars of influenza mutation and evolution. I won’t go into the specifics, but suffice it to say that influenza mutates and evolves rapidly, so that different strains appear every year and every few decades theres a pandemic. This means that if I had a natural immunity (and not just good luck), it wouldn’t protect me forever. The fear in the back of my mind is that when the next pandemic came, my mutation would make me hypersensitive to the virus, sealing my fate.

Now, my theory of natural immunity turns out to be true. A recent article in the journal PLoS Biology (technical article and general audience synopsis; I love PLoS, but that’s a subject for a different time) examined the genes of a number of flu viruses collected in New York State, including the so-called Fujian strain. Fujian just so happens to have certain mutations that make it different from the more common types of influenza, hence the epidemic of the 2003-2004 flu season.

These mutations also, apparently, allow it to overcome my natural immunity. The mutations obviously contribute to the strains increased pathogenicity. The bug that causes the coming pandemic is likely to have similar mutations as well as being ferociously virulent. Clearly, it has my name on it.

Really, its an emotional reaction to think that my mutation, which has so far granted me immunity, would work to my detriment when the avian flu strikes. Logically, I would be no more or less susceptible than anyone else. On the other hand, my body has only ever had to fight off one influenza virus, and that lack of general flu antibodies might work against me.

Hmm… When do flu shots start?