I keep hearing I should get a flu shot to help prevent bird flu — but I thought flu shots only prevented illness from the particular strains the shot was designed for. Does getting a traditional flu shot do anything to prevent bird flu transmission?

  • JWBananas@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    And to further drive it home, that’s how we got SARS (civets), MERS (camels), and COVID (bats/pangolins/unknown).

    So get the damn flu shot. The new cell-based vaccines are much more likely to match the actively circulating strains than the older egg-based ones (due to so-called egg adaptation).

    We nearly had a patient zero in Louisiana already, and their case was only an H5 mutation (not recombination from human strains). https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/spotlights/h5n1-response-12232024.html

    H5 is widespread in wild birds, and it is spreading to cats. It is only a matter of time.