BBC While current flu shots need to be updated each season, scientists are finding new ways to make vaccine that could last much longer and cover more strains.
Each year, roughly a billion people around the world catch the flu. You’ll know if you’ve got it – it can knock you out for a week or more with a fever, fatigue, headaches and a cough. It leaves millions of people each year unable to work and sadly claims the lives of between 290,000-650,000 people in a typical year.
It’s a miserable disease – and, unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that if you catch it one year, you go through the same ordeal the following year. Influenza is a wily virus, constantly shapeshifting to get around humans’ immune defences.
“That’s why you have to get a flu shot every year,” says Nicholas Heaton, a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine in North Carolina, US. Seasonal flu vaccines prevent many deaths and serious illnesses each year, but they are imperfect. Their effectiveness typically tops out around 60% and can dip well below that in years when the vaccine’s formula isn’t a good match for the virus that is actually spreading among humans.