The year you were born predicts flu risk

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2016/11/22/birth-year-predicts-bird-flu-risk/#more-7263

by sciadvance • 10 years ago

111 35 10 years ago

directorsblog.nih.gov

Zenst• 10 years ago

I'm wondering if this is also a factor in transplants and one area of complications that could be identified prior to transplant. A differing immune system and white blood cells would explain many failed transplants and also this might be one instance in which the immune systems of like blood types differ and effect outcomes. May be more case of not only matching blood type but also immune system compatibility, with this being once example of how they differ.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

The understanding of compatibility is already factoring in a great deal more than blood type, it's just that there is so much variation that donors rarely match recipients. See the HLA Typing part of this:

http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/transplant/livingdonation/donor...

SamBam2• 10 years ago

If it turns out that the very first fly virus you're exposed to has such a large effect on the immune system, it sounds like this could be great news for developing a better fly vaccine to give as a baby's first shot.

kodt• 10 years ago

That fly virus can be nasty, just ask Jeff Goldblum.

SamBam2• 10 years ago

I have no idea how I typed that twice in a row...

8ig8• 10 years ago

Was hoping I could enter my birth year and get back some risk prediction.

Senji• 10 years ago

If the data is open, kickstart a webpage or heroku or githubio with js.

sushid• 10 years ago

Not sure if it'd be that simple. The authors discuss only a few specific countries and admit that although the differences in the risk is "remarkably small, some noise arises from generalization across time and countries" [0].

And if you factor in that they were studying mostly Asian countries, Egypt, and Germany, there might be even more discrepancies to account for.

[0] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/354/6313/722.full

sna1l• 10 years ago

I feel like while this does open up a lot of new interesting questions, it could also just be happenstance.

It seems like there would be so many potential factors that could be causing a distribution like this. But I'm not a scientist, so dunno.

JoelBennett• 10 years ago

It's almost too bad there isn't some way of manufacturing all 18 varieties of hemagglutinin, and wrapping them all into a single vaccine.

rsync• 10 years ago

Do we want to not get the flu ?

I really hate getting the flu ... I hate feeling terrible for 12-24 hours, I hate missing multiple workouts ... hate hate hate.

However, in recent years I've stopped my (seemingly ineffective) efforts to avoid the flu at all costs and further have started to appreciate the positive effects that getting the flu every 12-18 months might have.

In an otherwise healthy adult, what puts your immune system through it's paces - what gives your immune system a workout - like having the flu ?

What happens to my immune system if I don't give it that thorough workout every year for ... say ... 40 years ? What kind of immune system do I end up with at the other end of avoiding the flu for a large chunk of my life ?

Related to that, what else gets killed every 12 months when my temperature goes up to 102 or 104 for half a day ?

dqv• 10 years ago

I'd generally like to avoid anything that changes my DNA (read: increases my risk of cancer).

Cancer will really give your immune system a work out.

derefr• 10 years ago

There was that strain of flu, a year or two ago, that was killing "otherwise healthy adults." I'd rather not have that one.

jedberg• 10 years ago

Getting your flu shot should give your immune system plenty workout.

It's like sparring at 1/2 power with full pads vs. getting into a full on street fight. Sure, the street fight will give you a slightly more real practice session, but at what cost? There is a lot of collateral damage there.

DasIch• 10 years ago

Don't mistake the flu for a cold. A cold is an inconvenience, the flu kills between a few thousand to tens of thousands of people, depending on which strain is currently dominant, every season in the US alone. You don't have to be particularly old or young for it to kill you either, quite a few otherwise perfectly healthy adults also manage to get to be unlucky.

danudey• 10 years ago

In an otherwise healthy adult, what puts your immune system through it's paces - what gives your immune system a workout - like having the flu ?

That's not how immune systems work. This isn't just a round of going to the gym. Getting a vaccine also gives your immune system a chance to learn and react, but without the severe degradation of your condition and the significant risk of secondary infection.

What happens to my immune system if I don't give it that thorough workout every year for ... say ... 40 years ?

First of all, you run less of a risk of getting secondary infection when your immune system is weakened. Secondly, you run a higher risk of transmitting the flu to people who can't be vaccinated (for example, babies or the elderly), putting their lives at risk.

[Herd immunity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity]

Related to that, what else gets killed every 12 months when my temperature goes up to 102 or 104 for half a day ?

That's the opposite of how your immune system works. While your system is focussed on fighting off one infection, it's less able to deal with secondary infections. You can end up spreading your system too thin and your health can deteriorate much more rapidly.

[Secondary/opportunistic infection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection#Primary_versus_oppor...]

In other words, not getting a vaccine is unwise both for yourself and for other people.

wflynny• 10 years ago

Yes, we do not want the flu. If you want to train your immune system, get the flu shot.

I got the flu 10 months ago as a healthy male in his late 20s, the first major illness I've had since I was 11. 102+ fever for over 5 days and then developed a pneumonia coinfection which knocked me out for another week. It was not just an inconvenience, it scared me being that sick.

The hospital I went to in Philadelphia to get treatment for the pneumonia said they had several young adult patients who were otherwise generally healthy in intensive care due to the bout of flu going around and related complications/coinfections. The flu kills people -- between 3,000 and 50,000 per year in the US [1]. Count yourself lucky that your experience with the flu has been as you described, if it was even the flu at all.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.h...

a_c_s• 10 years ago

What you're describing isn't "the flu".

12-24 hours seems more like a "stomach flu" (Gastroenteritis) or a cold (rhinovirus), neither of which is influenza (aka "the flu").

According to the CDC: "Most people who get influenza will recover in several days to less than two weeks, but some people will develop complications as a result of the flu."

As others have covered and explained better than I can, the immune system isn't a muscle that needs an annual workout, especially given the risks of serious complications like pneumonia.

pizza• 10 years ago

Lifting weights enlists otherwise unused muscles.

Getting vaccinated makes your body capable of enlisting otherwise non-present antibodies.

greglindahl• 10 years ago

You realize that the flu kills lots of elderly people? It's not just about you. A year in which the flu vaccine actually works well enough to break transmission would give a lot of people an extra year of life.

mfukar• 10 years ago

In an otherwise healthy adult, what puts your immune system through it's paces - what gives your immune system a workout - like having the flu ?

Getting a vaccine is training for the big game. Getting the virus is the big game. Show up to the big game without proper training and you might win, have a few broken ribs, a new face, a limp, or you might just straight up lose.

trhway• 10 years ago

It's almost too bad there isn't some way of manufacturing all 18 varieties of hemagglutinin, and wrapping them all into a single vaccine.

it seems that having just 2 varieties representing those 2 hemagglutinin groups can already provide pretty good protection.

Steeeve• 10 years ago

This is how a lot of incurable-epidemic movies get started.

Protostome• 10 years ago

How will you make sure the immune response won't be targeted at the same epitopes of all/most of the 18? That protein is known to have decoy epitopes..

oska• 10 years ago

From a bird flu perspective, 1970 doesn't look like a good year to be born. Has relatively high contraction rate for both H7N9 and H5N1.

tominous2• 10 years ago

[In 1968] a pandemic of H3N2 influenza, known as the Hong Kong flu, completely replaced the H2N2 and H1N1 seasonal influenza strains that circulated earlier.

I'm curious about the idea of flu viruses completely replacing each other. Do they interact or compete for resources in some way? Could we design a very mild flu which would replace other variants?

akiselev• 10 years ago

It's less like they're competing for resources and more like they're competing to see which one will survive the longest against the immune system. The human body is a nearly infinite source of food for pathogens but antibodies aren't always very precise in the strain they target. False positives are largely harmless so the B-cells that produce antibodies are even less discriminating.

When you have similar strains of a bacteria or virus, they can all cause the same immune reaction (which is how vaccines work) but tiny genetic variations in each strain can also drastically change how effective the reaction is against variant. Since bacteria/viruses reproduce very vast and the immune system is very good at its job, you essentially get an accelerated arms race that heavily favors the survival of the fittest. Even one part per million difference in probabilities is almost enough to guarantee the dominance of a single strain.

tominous2• 10 years ago

That explains tiny variations, but the article is talking about a shift to a new variant which requires a different immune response.

The question is why did this new variant "completely replace" the old ones in the population, instead of just operating in parallel?

The only thing I can think of is that the old flu variants were in decline already due to herd immunity, but the article seemed to imply there was more to it than that.

eatbitseveryday• 10 years ago

I'm a little confused. The figures show number of cases. Higher number of cases = greater risk?

The year you were born predicts flu risk

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