In the US, up to 64 million people are infected with influenza every year with 51 thousand cases resulting in death. (Treanor) The fever, runny nose, and body aches keep Americans curled up in their bed, miserable, all week. You try to do everything you can to isolate yourself from the virus, but somehow it always finds a way to get you sick. It seems like it is the same routine every year of taking days off work or completing make up work for school. Records of influenza symptoms date back thousands of years, with many massive outbreaks such as the 1918 Spanish flu and the 2009 Swine flu pandemic along the way. Scientists have been searching for a cure for years, but even through modern medicine, the fight against influenza continues. The structure, replication process, and limitations on modern medicine are just a few factors that keep influenza spreading across the world every year.
Influenza is a special kind of microbe known as a virus. It is round and significantly smaller than its microbe counterparts such as bacteria, archaea, and eukaryota. Influenza is an enveloped
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There are some strains of influenza that escape the vaccination every year. Viruses are highly susceptible to mutations during replication, so these strains likely experience a mutation in either the hemagglutinin or neuraminidase at some point. This mutation alters the shape of these glycoproteins, causing the antibodies in the victim’s immune system to not be able to bind to the virus. This is usually where the seasonal flu virus comes from each year. New strains of influenza mutate all the time, causing all organisms vulnerable to become sick and start the process of developing new antibodies all over again. (Marcie) An example of antigenic drift can be seen in Figure 1. The Avian Influenza Gene Pool produced H1N1. It continued to be classified as H1N1, but there are multiple outbreaks of it as the virus underwent antigenic