Guest blogger Kimberly Hayes Taylor is a national award-winning journalist who specializes in covering health, fitness and relationships. Her work is published in a number of national online and print publications.
Why do some people get the flu after taking every imaginable precaution, and others never seem to even get as much as a scratchy throat or the sniffles?
The answer lies in a person’s immune system response to the flu virus, says Alfred Hero, professor at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. In one of the first studies of its kind, Hero and researchers from the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy used genomics to unravel this mystery. Their findings were published in the August 25 edition of the journal PLoS Genetics.
“This study gets at one aspect of addressing the question what, if anything, happens when you are exposed to the flu virus,” Hero said. “You shake a hand of someone who has just blown their nose or you touch a door knob that has some virus on it and you walk away from that not realizing you have been exposed. Others get sick and have to take days off work and are miserable.”
To understand exactly what happens, researchers inoculated 17 people with the flu virus, and then watched their immune response through gene expression as they either got sick or didn’t. Half of participants got sick and the other half never felt any flu symptoms.
“What we saw was very striking,” Hero said. “Many people might conclude that if you are exposed to a virus and you don’t get sick it’s because the virus didn’t stick or it was so weak, it just passed through your system and your system didn’t notice. That’s not a correct notion.” He continued, “There is an active immune response which accounts for the resistance of certain people to getting sick and that response is just as active as the response we all know and love to hate, which is being sick with the sniffles and fever and coughing and sneezing.”
The scientists reviewed more than 22,000 genes and 267 blood samples, and found the quiet, but active process the body goes through when it is exposed to the flu virus. Hero, who also is affiliated with the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science & Arts, says after studying what happens to the genome when exposed to a virus, he hopes scientists will eventually figure out how to prevent the flu that protects against all flu viruses (the annual shots target specific strains of the virus that are expected to be prevalent that year and don’t offer 100 percent protection) or come up with an inexpensive at-home test so people will have advance notice when they’re likely to develop flu symptoms soon.
CONNECT THE DOTS
For more information about the flu, visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, flu.gov and the Mayo Clinic. To read more healthymagination posts about the flu, check out: “Coming to You Soon: A Single Shot for All Flu,” “What’s New in Fighting the Flu?,” and “Visualizing Search Data: Flu Around the World.”
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