New Study Finds Flu Virus "Paralyzes" Immune System

mmmscience writes with this excerpt from Examiner.com: "A study coming out of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found that the influenza virus manages to dysregulate the immune system, allowing other infections to thrive in the body. This discovery, coming at an opportune time as the world battles the new H1N1 flu outbreak, may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals."

Comments

Mortality rates and the flu

[ergo98]

may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals

They speak generally about "the flu", but then use the extreme outliers of the Spanish flu of 1918, and the worst fears of the H1N1 virus, as their examples.

My understanding was that the flu virus hits the immuno-compromised much harder -- the young and the elderly being the most at risk, with it being a day or two off work for people with normal immune systems.

H1N1 is getting a lot of attention primarily because it was outside of the norm for the flu, hitting healthy individuals hard in Mexico, although not repeating that behaviour elsewhere.

Re:Mortality rates and the flu

[Chlorine Trifluoride]

Flu does hit them much harder, but the reason that the Spanish flu killed some many young, healthy people was because it launched a cytokine storm, something that was replicated in H5N1 (remember that?). So far, H1N1 does not seem to do this, although TFA suggests that it might.

ScienceFUD

[DynaSoar]

"the influenza virus manages to dysregulate the immune system"

is very different from

"they also found a decreased response of toll-like receptors, which activate immune cell responses as a result of invading microbes."

The latter is not only an accurate accounting of the result, it doesn't overgeneralize the implications. The mechanism studied is only part of the highly complex immune system. The results do not suggest, as does the headline, that the entire immune system gets hosed.

strangely enough

[circletimessquare]

the flu virus has also been found to paralyze the attentions of the mass media industry