Giving Compass' Take:

• A new study shows that how successfully we fend off the flu virus depends not only on its notorious ability to change with the season but also on the strain we first encountered during childhood.

• How might funders in the health space spread greater awareness over the importance of a flu vaccination? 

• Here's an article on the consequences of the high percentage of adults who don't want the flu vaccine. 

The findings offer an explanation for why some patients fare much worse than others when infected with the same strain of the flu virus. The results also could help inform strategies aimed at curbing the impact from the seasonal flu.

“The last two flu seasons have been more severe than expected,” says coauthor Michael Worobey, head of the ecology and evolutionary biology department at the University of Arizona and a member of the BIO5 Institute.

“In the 2017-18 season, 80,000 people died in the US, more than in the swine flu pandemic of 2009. Influenza is a major, major killer—not just in this country, but worldwide.”

For decades, the fact that the same strain of the flu virus affects people to various degrees of severity vexed scientists and healthcare professionals. Then, in 2016, researchers (including Worobey and some of the coauthors of the new paper) presented a paper in Science showing that past exposure to the flu virus determines an individual’s response to subsequent infections, a phenomenon called immunological imprinting.

The discovery helped overturn the prior commonly held belief that previous exposure to a flu virus conferred little or no immunological protection against strains that can jump from animals into humans, such as those causing the so-called swine flu or bird flu.

Read the full article about fighting the flu virus by Daniel Stolte at Futurity.