by Bruce Ziebarth

Created on: June 22, 2010

Public health professionals advise us to get our yearly flu vaccine. Some choose not to take the vaccine. Some choose not to because they believe it will give them the flu. Others make this choice because they do not think it will help. In order to make an informed decision, you should consider the purpose of vaccination and how it affects the flu.

Vaccination does not equal immunity. Over the decades, vaccination has been used almost synonymously with immunity. Successful vaccines have caused diseases, such as Polio, to become almost non-existent. This caused people to belief that vaccines keep you from getting sick. That is far from the truth.

Vaccines cause your body to “recognize” the disease agent. A vaccine is made up of the targeted disease itself. For the majority of vaccines, the disease inside is dead. Once injected, your body does not recognize that the disease is dead. Your immune system fights the disease. If you are late exposed to that disease then your body recognizes it and knows which anti-bodies to produce.

Flu virus's characteristics complicates this process. There are multiple flu virus's. Unlike other diseases, the flu virus's regularly mutate. Flu virus's can move between humans into animals then back into humans. This is just one situation that can cause the flu virus to mutate. Resulting in new flu virus's. This situation caused the 2009/2010 H1N1 Pandemic.

Even if you take the flu shot each year, you can get sick. We see the influenza virus each year; however, we do not always see the exact same virus. In the spring of each year, vaccine manufactures look at historical information and try to predict which flu virus might show up. They then produce flu vaccines based on these predictions. If the predictions are not close enough or the virus mutates then the manufactured vaccine may have little affect.

Flu virus's ability to mutate and multiple virus types can hinder a vaccine's effectiveness. This does not mean that you should not get your yearly flu vaccination. Each vaccine provides your body the chance to learn. This year's vaccine may not exactly match the seasonal flu virus type; however, a past vaccination might. For example, elderly people who had been through a bad flu season in the early 1960s were found to have some immunity to the H1N1 virus. For your own health, do not skip your yearly flu vaccine.

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