Comment Re:What's the big deal? (Score 1) 147
Can anyone explain why this virus is so different from all the others floating around? Why the panic?
It's a strain that is new to man - human populations don't have immunity against this particular, novel virus - they are naive from an immunity standpoint.
Today's seasonal influenza strains have been around for quite some time. They were once pandemic viruses, ie novel viruses that spread worldwide and against which mankind developed immunity.
They now lay around and keep mutating in a constant attempt to escape (or so it is believed) human immunity, by a process which is called "antigenic drift". Even though people aren't entirely naive to those strains - as people once were, when they first appeared and were pandemic influenza viruses; and as people are, today, to the novel h1n1 strain.
This h1n1 virus doesn't have the limitation of global resistance in human populations. Even though it's no more deadly in its current incarnation than the typical seasonal influenza, the potential is entirely different.
