H1N1 flu

A study coming out of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found that the influenza virus manages to dysregulate the immune system, allowing other infections to thrive in the body.  This discovery, coming at an opportune time as the world battles the new H1N1 flu outbreak, may be the first step in understanding why the flu can cause such high mortality rates in normally healthy individuals.

Actually the problem with the 1918 flu virus was that it had unusually high mortality rates for people with strong immune systems.

The reasoning was that a lot of people died not from the infection itself, but from an *excessive immune response* (cytokine storm).