As we know, influenza is quite a common epidemic disease. If you have the flu, you may have a sore throat and runny nose, you may cough, we call these respiratory symptoms. Meanwhile, you will also have some constitutional symptoms, like fever or chill, fatigue and body ache.
But you may think "what causes influenza?" The answer is influenza virus. There are three types of influenza virus: type A, B and C. Type A is the most common type and we often hear about it, type B and C are less talked about.
So we mainly talk about the type A virus. There are so many subspecies of type A that we have an exclusive naming system for it. Scientists found there are 17 types of hemagglutinin(H protein) and 10 types of neuraminidase(N protein) on the envelope of the virus. We name the virus based on the H protein and N protein. For example, H3N2 means the virus has the third type of H protein and the second type of N protein. You may often hear about "H1N1" "H3N2", now you know why people call them like that.
After knowing something about influenza virus, it is important and necessary to know how to prevent you from virus. Let's imagine how you interact with environment. If you use your hands to touch something with virus and then you touch your face, that's a way for virus to get into your body. Actually the most common way is through the respiratory tract. For example, there is a sick person near you and he is coughing, the virus can get into your nose and then into your body when you breath. So it's quite important to wash your hands, avoid sick people and don't touch your face frequently. But actually the most effective way is to get vaccinated. Especially the high risk groups(little kids, elderly, pregnant women, patients with chronic disease ), it's necessary for them to get vaccinated, cause if they have a flu, they will not only have influenza symptoms but also some complications, it's quite serious, right?
There are two types of influenza vaccine––TIV(trivalent inactivated vaccine) and LAIV( live attenuated influenza vaccine). TIV contains dead viruses and we inject it in arm. Viruses in LAIV are alive but weak, so you don't need to worry about it will cause an influenza, it can only cause problems in your nose and won't cause any problems in other places.
Now people may ask" Am I completely safe after I get vaccinated?" I'm sorry to say it's not. The vaccine is 60 percent to 70 percent effective.That means you're not 100 percent isolated from the virus after you're vaccinated. And the vaccine usually takes about two weeks to take full effect. But it's still the best way to prevent you from virus.
There's another thing you should be aware of: are you eligible for vaccination? Cause the people listed below can't get vaccinated:
Allergic to eggs or vaccine
Guillian–Barre symptom
fever or acute infect
chronic disease
