Vaccination

The Robert Koch Institute recommends an annual flu vaccination for people over 60, healthcare professionals and people with chronic illnesses. The reason why the vaccination has to be given annually is that many different strains of the virus exist and they are constantly rewriting their genetic information to escape the body’s defense mechanisms (see below). For this reason, a vaccine is produced each year that provides protection against the strains that are most widespread this year.

The vaccination is administered as a one-time vaccination in the autumn; for children up to the age of 12, the vaccination dose can be divided into two vaccinations at intervals of about four weeks to improve the response rate. After the vaccination, the immune system needs about two weeks to build up protection. This is achieved in about 80-90% of those vaccinated. In this context it should be emphasized: A cold (flu-like infection) is not a flu and is caused by other pathogens! Consequently, flu vaccination cannot protect against colds.

Why does one get the flu again and again?

If you have survived a viral disease, you are in many cases immune to the virus in question, so you cannot get the same infection again. For the flu virus, this is also true in principle, but once you have survived a flu, you are immune only to the one strain of virus that was responsible for the illness. Unfortunately, as described above, there are many different strains of the flu virus, so that one can get the flu again and again.

In addition, the individual strains also constantly change their gene code through gene drift and gene shift (see below), making them even more difficult for the immune system to calculate. However, flu vaccination has the advantage that it contains the most common strains of the respective autumn, so that the vaccinated person receives broad protection at least for this winter season and his or her risk of getting the flu is considerably reduced. Influenza