H1N1 pandemic that rocked health systems in the summer and fall of 2009 has left aside skepticism and doubt, an interesting lesson. Offered a chance to experiment and measure the immune response in healthy people without having them artificially to expose the virus, and to determine factors influencing the severity of infection acquired. That’s what they did researchers from Imperial College London with a group of 342 individuals, and its conclusion, which were published in Nature Medicine , is that the disease was milder the greater was their concentration a type of white blood cells, CD-8. The conclusion, according to Ajit Lalvani, principal investigator of the work is that preventive treatment that would stimulate the production of CD-8 could be a general vaccination, which depend on the type of flu virus circulate each winter. Or, in other words, that there could be the key to universal immunization not be changed every year depending on waterborne pathogens.
the study was based on a group of healthy volunteers and measured their behavior during two waves of H1N1 in the UK. In the end, two thirds passed the disease with different levels of severity.
Raul Ortiz, spokesman for the Spanish Society of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (SEIMC) values, above all, the job objective. “Current vaccines are for one year. This article is in line of those seeking protection for life or, at least, for a number of years. ” This would save on vaccination, and would not need to inject the entire population at risk each year, as happens now in the Northern Hemisphere.
The idea is to avoid having to be immunized each year
However, Ortiz believes that the work has some biases that make it very preliminary. For starters, the volunteers were mostly students and researchers of the center, and therefore young. Their average age was 28 years. “And the flu does not behave the same in the elderly,” he says.
addition, the experiment is equivalent to live virus inoculate volunteers. “This has already been tried, but with attenuated virus. In this case we used wild virus, which was obtained by an infection, not a vaccine, “he says. This may alter the results of the work, he adds.
In any case, the results point to one of the most promising lines in trials to get a universal influenza vaccine: no set in response to the surface proteins (the H and N is used to characterize each virus), but the internal, “that change less,” explains Ortiz.
Until that happens, this year’s vaccine will have components from several virus (AH1N1, AH3N2 and the one or two B, Massachusetts and, if possible, also Brisbane). The idea is to fight infection, according to the World Health Organization, because every winter between three and five million cases severe illness and between 200,000 and 500,000 deaths.
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