Are you immune to swine flu? I am? do I need vaccination still?

I wonder if I can be immune to swine flu, as we know that older people that survived earlier pandemics have antibodies for the modern swine flu or 2008.

I am trying to find out how If can get a test to see if I have already antibodies for the swine flu and if this will help in some way to stay away from the vaccination.

Does anybody knows or have any information about this?

Help will be appreciated.

Old People May Be Immune to Swine Flu

Just having been alive for a while could protect you from getting the novel swine flu circling the planet.

In 1977, a type of H1N1 virus, commonly known as the “Russian flu,” spread across the world, infecting people under 25 at much higher rates than their elders, who had been exposed to similar viruses in the ’40s and ’50s. In the first documented American outbreak, 70 percent of the students fell ill at a high school in Cheyenne, Wyoming, while their teachers proved immune. As the Air Force Academy’s chief medical officer said in 1978, “It’s one of the advantages of being middle-aged.”

Now, Leonard Mermel, an infectious disease specialist at Rhode Island Hospital, suggests the current flu virus could be similar enough to that ’70s strain that older people could again find themselves immune to a new virus.

“It might be that the H1N1 circulating now (swine-origin influenza virus) has enough antigenic similarity to related H1N1 influenza strains of the past to protect older individuals exposed to them previously,” Mermel wrote in a letter to the journal The Lancet.

www.wired.com...

I think they can test for antibodies, but researchers are unsure if old antibodies can fight current flu strains in an actual animal/human, since the tests have only been performed in test tubes.

You can read more here:

Old seasonal flu antibodies target swine flu virus

reply to post by Toromos


Thanks, I did this thread because I have been wondering
how effective the flu vaccine is against people that already had gotten the swine flu.

That means older people and the millions that have been infected in the US so far.