Having lived more years than others may just be the difference between getting infected by the Swine Flu, and just shrugging it off.

Leonard Mermel, an infectious disease specialist a Rhodes Island Hospital, has suggested that older people may have been exposed to other variants of the H1N1 virus before, and thus, would most probably be immune to the current AH1N1 strain that the Swine Flu is notorious for.

A case in point is the 1977 worldwide outbreak of the Russian flu, a type of H1N1 virus, which infected people around 25 years of age more than it did for people who were substantially older. Analysis suggests that these elderly were exposed to other types of H1N1 in the past, and may just have developed the immunity for it.

The same type of logic is used in most vaccines, including influenza. Vaccine work by injecting the body with substantially weakened strains of the virus that causes the disease being vaccinated. This forces the body to fight the viruses as they would when you actually get infected by it, but because the vaccine’s viruses are weakened, the body gets to fight them off fairly easily, and it manufactures the right kinds of antibodies to develop an immunity to it. This is also the reason why most people feel feverish after being vaccinated for influenza.

Mermel argues that this may also be the case for AH1N1. “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 Lancet.

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