I wrote a couple of posts last year about
how the seasonal flu is really just Vitamin D deficiency disease and why I take a fermented cod liver oil supplement every day even when I get good doses of midday Florida sunshine.
Like many influenza virologists, John Steel of Emory University in Atlanta often uses a feeble lab strain of influenza in his studies of
how seasonal flu spreads.
Not exact matches
The 1917 virus had infection and mortality rates typical of
seasonal flu, but a single mutation in the proteins affecting
how the virus binds to a host cell may have led to the deadly 1918 wave, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide.
The annual UK Flusurvey aims to collect data from men and women of all ages around the country, in order to map trends as
seasonal flu takes hold, enabling researchers to analyse
how the virus spreads and who it affects.
Researchers, led by Dr Gregory Poland and Dr Richard Kennedy from the Mayo Clinic, set out to examine
how differences in an individual's immune cells correlate to their response to the
seasonal flu vaccine.
But
how do you really know if you have the
flu — swine or
seasonal — or if it's just another cold or an allergy?