A NOVEL STUDY HAS FOUND THAT ADULTS ONLY CATCH FLU AROUND TWICE A DECADE

LONDON: Researchers have discovered that adults just get influenza twice in 10 years on average, proposing that the greater part of the cough and colds that keep a huge number of individuals off work each year are down to other bugs.

This research will extend understanding about how the infection spreads, who is most at danger and how to create and deploy antibodies to combat it, said scientists who carried out the study.

"For grown-ups, we found that flu infection is considerably less common than some people believe. In babyhood and at puberty, it’s substantially more common, possibly in light of the fact that we interact more with other people of different groups," said Steven Riley of Imperial College London, who worked on the examination.

The research team analyzed the blood samples from volunteers in Southern China, taking a look at antibody levels against nine different influenza strains that circulated from 1968 to 2009.

They found that while kids get influenza almost each other year, flu illness got to be less common with age.

"Flu like sicknesses" can frequently be caused by different other types of viruses, like, rhinoviruses and coronaviruses, the scientists said, making it tricky for individuals to know whether they have genuine flu.

Evaluating flu's frequency, the researcher’s team, including analysts from Britain, the United States and China, developed a mathematical model of how immunity to flu varies over a lifetime as individuals experience many different kinds of virus strains.

This finding could help scientists and drug makers to foresee how the virus will or may change in future and how immunity to past strains impacts the way antibodies work and how successful they will be.

"What we've done in this study is to analyze how a person's immunity builds up over a lifetime of flu infections," said Adam Kucharski, who worked on the study at Imperial College London before moving to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

"This ... helps us comprehend the helplessness of the populace as a whole and how simple it is for new seasonal strains to spread through the populace."

This finding is published in the diary PLOS Biology.