A Quote by Carl Zimmer

When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.
Swine flu is not an anomaly. We know that swine flu - like the vast majority of new outbreaks - comes from animals. We should be monitoring those animals and the humans that come into contact with them, so we can catch these viruses early, before they infect major cities and spread throughout the world.
There is some research that suggests that viruses like the flu are really actually kind of at the razor's edge when it comes to mutation. They're mutating so fast that if they mutated much faster they would actually develop a lot of harmful mutations that could slow them down and cripple them and eventually literally drive them extinct.
With 30,000 deaths and 200,000 hospitalizations from the seasonal flu, those numbers are certainly higher than what we've seen of the swine flu. Protecting yourself from both viruses is very important.
We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.
Those people who get the flu shot not only protect themselves from getting the flu or reducing their likelihood of developing the flu, but those around them.
Surveying the way viruses have been discovered in the past, I came to the conclusion that I could use my technology that I developed as a graduate student - DNA microarray technology - to create a chip that would simultaneously screen for all viruses ever discovered, and furthermore have the built-in capability of discovering new viruses.
The reason that viruses are so hard to fight, the reason for example we need a flu virus every year is that they evolve very fast.
With the absence of a flu vaccination last year, I did not take a flu shot; but there is still some immunity that carries over from year to year; but about every 30 years, there is a major change in the genetics of the flu virus.
More than 50 million people around the world died during the 1918-1919 flu pandemic. That's why we have epidemiologists all over the world tracking whether new strains of flu emerge.
Think about old people; think about young people, those with immune system problems. They can't really protect themselves well against the flu, so by you limiting the spread of the flu and getting vaccinated, you're helping protect them as well.
A local pharmacy is a great place to get a safe and effective COVID vaccine as well as a flu shot. It's critical that people get these vaccines to protect themselves and slow the spread of the COVID virus as well as the flu.
I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.
Why do our kids need to be protected from flu? Isn't that something only for the cold western countries who have long, cold, below-zero winters? That's what I thought until I learnt that India's tropical weather facilitates circulation of viruses around the year, unlike the West, which sees a peak only during winter.
Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.
There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.
Over millions of years the viruses in our genome mutate more and more so the look less and less and less recognizable as viruses and so if there was a virus that infected our pre mammal ancestors like 250 million years ago, which it probably did, we can't see it because it just looks totally random.
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