The word – flurona – is the synthesis of flu, influence in English, and corona. Many have called it the perfect marriage, the one between the two viruses, the flu and Sars-Cov-2, which managed to cause a contemporary infection in a woman, in Israel. At least the first with a certain diagnosis. The case is worrying those countries, including ours, where the flu season is coinciding with the increase in cases due to the great contagiousness of the Omicron variant.
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Can two viruses at the same time make a patient’s picture worse? In the case of the new Israeli mother – obviously vaccinated – it did not happen: the woman did not have particularly serious symptoms, other than the parainfluenza symptoms, such as fever. And it is not yet known, in the sense that there are no reliable data, to understand whether a co-infection can prove to be more or less harmful, in particular for frail patients, such as the elderly and immunosuppressed. And while WHO has given the green light to make the two vaccines together, vaccines that hold flu and other viruses together are already being studied. After all, we often forget how even the flu itself is anything but trivial, given that every year, even before the arrival of Covid, several thousand people died of causes attributable to the flu virus.
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“The infection of Covid and flu together is a bit strange because in medicine it has always been said that if there is a virus that gives one disease it prevents another from developing due to a different virus. The explanation could lie in the fact that Covid causes a defect in the production of interferon and this would open the way to the other virus, which in this case is the flu “, he explained Roberto Tail, infectious disease specialist at the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome and scientific advisor of the EMA.
“The case found in Israel – he added – leads us to say even more vaccinate against the flu”.
Meanwhile, in recent days, an important novelty has arrived precisely on the anti-flu vaccine front: a group of researchers coordinated by the Scripps Research Institute of La Jolla published on Nature a study that sets the stage for a universal flu vaccine. It has in fact identified a new portion of influenza virus against which to target new generation vaccines: it is present in several viruses of the H1 family and at least in a part of those of the H2 and H5 family. It also has no tendency to mutate.
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