H1N1

In the positive news that came out this week, a team of international researchers found that ferrets exposed to a common seasonal human flu — H1N1 — before being exposed to H5N1, acquire some immunity from the seasonal flu.

“After all, many people have severe seasonal H1N1 infections each year despite lots of immunity to the virus from previous H1N1 exposures.”

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, for example, early research showed the risk of miscarriage seemed to be elevated among pregnant women who got the vaccine two consecutive years in a row.

The two types of flu generally circulating now are H1N1 — related to the swine flu strain that caused a flu pandemic in 2009 and 2010 — and H3N2, which “is notorious for just causing more serious illness in general,” Chin-Hong said previously.

In a December episode of her new podcast, Public Health is Dead, Daniella Barreto took listeners behind the scenes at the Orpheum, a Vancouver theatre built in 1918 to be a luxurious, comfortable venue — cunningly designed to provide excellent ventilation in order to prevent spread of disease, like the age-old scourge of tuberculosis, but more specifically the H1N1 influenza, which swept the world in that last year of WWI, killing 675,000 Americans.