TWiV 480: The PFU in your achoo

Scott Hensley joins the TWiVites to review the current influenza season and presence of the virus in exhaled breath of symptomatic cases.

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Scott Hensley of the University of Pennsylvania helps us summarize the current influenza season so far. Bottom line: it’s a very serious season with a great deal of morbidity and mortality. As usually, serious disease and deaths occur in unvaccinated individuals. Although there is a mismatch between the influenza vaccine and this year’s H3N2 strain, which is causing most of the infections, vaccination still reduces disease severity cause by this strain, as well as by the circulating H1N1 and influenza B viruses. Next we discuss an interesting study of symptomatic college students with influenza. The goal was to determine which mode of influenza transmission is likely to be important: contact, or aerosols produced by speaking, coughing, or sneezing. The results show that simple breathing leads to virus in the breath – small aerosols that can travel distances to infect others. Coughing, but not sneezing, was a major observed sign of infection, but neither was needed for infectious aerosol generation.