Our immune systems are amazing things.
They operate on the principle of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
When our bodies are exposed to a pathogen, they blindly attack, throwing themselves at the invaders until they find something that works to stop the infection.
But the next time the same infection comes around, our bodies remember it, and they’re ready for it before it gets a foothold.
Vaccines work by triggering that response in our bodies. Once we’ve been vaccinated, our bodies are ready for when the real infection tries to make inroads.
The flu virus, however, has gotten hip to that groove and changes itself to avoid our bodies’ defenses.
So we humans wage an ever-changing battle to fight off the flu before it can do too much damage to our population.
Last week, the Associated Press reported about 50 strains of the swine flu have been found in North Carolina that are resistant to Tamiflu, one of the treatments used to fight it.
The Centers for Disease Control are worried that those strains could break out and cause massive problems for the public.
And they should be worried. Modern medicine has made the flu seem like little more than a cold, but the reality is, the flu can be deadly.
A significant outbreak of treatment-resistant flu can throw us back to the days of deadly epidemics quicker than you can wipe your nose.
We hope they can contain the outbreaks, but if they can’t, we should be prepared to fight the flu the old-fashioned way: by avoiding infection.
