Every Winter and Fall, millions
of people are infected with viral flu which causes body aches, runny noses and
fever. Viruses are smaller than human cells and
bacteria.
When a virus enters the body it starts to attack the cell. If the
immune system recognizes this invader, it will be destroy the virus before it
gains entry to the cell. If the virus finds it way inside the cell, the process
of infection begins.
Once inside the cell, the virus takes over the
cell's own replication machinery and it starts making lots of copies of itself.
After the virus, has replicated, the new virus then bursts out of the host cell,
destroying the host cell and can go on to infect more cells
Our immune system fights of this virus by recognizing the proteins on the surface of the virus. But in certain types of
virus, these proteins keep changing as the virus mutates, as a result a vaccine
developed one year ago might not work. This is the reason why we get flu vaccine every year, because the strain might be different each year.
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