I’m having a hurry up and wait day. Flu threads always interest me. The only time I’ve been hospitalized with an illness was with complications from the flu. Had my shot that year, but got one of the strains they didn’t vaccinated for. That was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. I get my flu vaxx annually, but I’m hoping that having had it may provide some additional, longer lasting immunity.
I have given that much thought - about crossover and past vaccine immunity hanging around with the T and B cells - in my case from the last many years of flu vaccine.
I had salmonella twice in college (from stupidity), cultured and proven. Later I worked in a lab that took my blood and tried to titer out my antibody to it, but stopped at something like 1:10 million and gave up. My serum was still responding at that enormously high dilution. Anyway, gives credence to the idea that titers can hang out for years - and so, perhaps your bout with flu will keep you from ever having that strain and cousins again.
I never mind getting the vaccines. Someone in Vermont commented above about it being a bad year. Wonder if it is working eastward?
It could, depending on the strain. I got the Russian flu when I was in HS back in 1978 which was an H1N1 strain so I hope that has given me at least partial immunity. Well over half of my school came down with it over a two-week period. There were so many absences that the school postponed our midterm exams. The big thing I remember about it was not just the fatigue and chest congestion, but the splitting headache, like someone had split my head open with an axe, that lasted about 2 days. I remember my mother putting a heavy blanket over my bedroom window to keep the light out and putting cold washcloths on my head.
1977 – Russian flu (H1N1)
The outbreak of Russian flu first appeared in northen China in May 1977 and spread throughout Russia by December, and the rest of the world in 1978. As mentioned above, the virus was subsequently found to be virtually identical to one that had caused a human epidemic in 1950. Consequently, most people over 23 years old possessed antibody to it. Thus, the pandemic was confined almost entirely to children and teenagers. Thankfully, the illness was quite mild and weekly attack rates at peak were about 13% in children 7–14 years old. Unlike the previous two pandemic viruses, this virus failed to replace the previously circulating influenza A virus, such that currently both H1N1 and H3N2 viruses circulate in humans.
https://www.rapidreferenceinfluenza.com/chapter/B978-0-7234-3433-7.50010-4/aim/influenza-pandemics-of-the-past