Can we make a flu vaccine that lasts for life?
The flu shots of the future could protect you for decades.
Getting your flu shot every single year is a real pain in the arm.
Sure, it helps protect you and everyone around you. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that flu vaccines prevented 5.1 million cases of the disease during the 2015 to 2016 flu season alone. But few of us actually look forward to the hassle of taking time from work or school to get poked by needles. Wouldn’t it be great if we could figure out how to make one vaccine that gave us lifelong protection against every strain of flu?
It turns out that scientists are actually working on flu vaccines that would stay potent year after year. “We’re aspiring to something that would get us out of the loop of annual vaccination,” says James Crowe, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. “Also, we’re aspiring to have something that would get not just one pandemic flu, but many or most of them.”
Here’s why the flu is so good at outwitting us, and how we’re fighting back.
