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Opinion

Influenza As a Problem in Immunology

From the Department of Microbiology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine of The City University of New York, New York, New York 10029

Abstract

Influenza persists in this last quarter of the 20th century as an important cause of wholesale human incapacity and death. Paradoxically, it does so in the face of recent improvements in inactivated vaccines developed 30 years ago and striking advances in the understanding of the structure, replication, and genetics of the influenza viruses during the past decade. Neither prior infection nor artificial immunization provides lasting immunity against the constantly changing virus of influenza. In part, the transient protection induced by presently available inactivated viral vaccines is related to rapid decline of vaccine-induced homologous antibody; in part, vaccine obsolescence is the result of viral mutation to antigens unlike or less like those contained in the vaccine.

The threat of pandemic influenza is so awesome that major efforts are required for its curtailment upon even the hint of its inception, as was the case with swine influenza during 1976 (1).