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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Burton Strauss III, post: 4514330, member: 59677&quot;]Absolutely correct. The common flu vaccine mutates every year, several times. There are two major types, A and B and eight or nine strains across the two.</p><p><br /></p><p>The vaccine is produced months in advance, based on the best guess as to which strain(s) will be most common during the upcoming season.</p><p><br /></p><p>Some years the guess is pretty good and the immunization provides decent protection. Some years the guess is bad (a late emergent strain or just something that wasn&#039;t circulating in Australia when they produced the vaccine). Those years are a bad season.</p><p><br /></p><p>There is some evidence that exposure to a strain provides a little immunity when that comes back around ... they trace families such as A/Hong Kong through the years.</p><p><br /></p><p>Combine the guess with a major mutation to a strain not seen in many years and you get a brutal season... IIRC the last bad one about 3 years ago was a throwback to a strain not seen in over 30 years. Nobody younger than that had ever seen it.</p><p><br /></p><p>If it&#039;s really, really bad, it&#039;s a pandemic.</p><p><br /></p><p>But the year over year ebb and flow is basically &quot;the flu&quot; and we&#039;ve become accustomed to just living with it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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