Word: flu
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...long do flu antibodies last...
...study we were looking for antibodies to the 1918 flu. This flu virus was reconstructed a number of years ago in the lab, so we were able to test to see if 90 years later we could still find antibodies. I recruited survivors, people who were born in 1915 or earlier and thus presumably survived the 1918 flu. We found that virtually all the people born in 1915 or earlier - about 90% of them - had good "titers" to the 1918 flu, which means they still had reasonably high concentrations of the antibodies in their blood, whereas among controls, people...
...results. I sent the blood samples from the survivors to my colleagues, Chris Basler at Mount Sinai, who's a professor of microbiology, and James Crowe at Vanderbilt, who's in pediatrics, microbiology and immunology. Dr Crowe and his colleagues at Vanderbilt isolated five different antibodies to the 1918 flu. Then Dr. Basler and colleagues looked at how those antibodies bind to the virus. It was quite strong and specific. We tried to compare it to other viruses, studying, for example, whether the antibody would bind to the flu of 1999 or to earlier ones, like the 1943 flu. Most...
...think the most definitive experiment we did was in mice. If you give mice the 1918 influenza, it kills them quite rapidly. It's very lethal. Terry Tumpey at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention infected mice with the various strains that made up the 1918 flu. Then we treated the mice either with our five antibodies or with controls. (There were two controls. One was human gamma globulin, which are just pooled antibodies that bind to a lot of different things. The other was the antibody to one of the modern bird flus.) And all of the control...
...think that diseases, other viruses and other pathogens, can behave differently. Antibodies are made by something called memory B cells, and the memory B cells for the 1918 flu clearly live for the lifespan of the human organism, which is wonderful. It raises important questions for looking at other pathogens, however, and it's important to try to look at these questions for different pathogens individually. Evidence shows it's important to get a regular tetanus booster, for example. Still, our new study may suggest another angle to look at things, which is how long do memory B cells last...