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If you have this health problem, your flu shot may not work
About two-thirds of the U.S. population is overweight or obese. If you find yourself among that two-thirds, there’s something else you should know.
If you get a flu shot, it will probably be less than effective.
Melinda Beck, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that metabolisms change when people become overweight.
This affects many cells in the body, including those in the immune system. And, if you’re carrying too much weight, one type of immune cell, in particular, will be the one that fails.
Two parts to the immune response
Antibodies are proteins that “mark” or identify invading cells so that they can be destroyed by the immune system.
T-cells are part of the system that carries this out, either by killing an invading cell directly or by directing another cell to do so.
A person who is obese or overweight can still manufacture antibodies. However, the changes in their metabolism cause T-cells to malfunction.
That’s why the flu vaccine is often ineffective in obese people, and they can get the flu, even when they’ve been vaccinated.
This happens with age, too.
“A 30-year-old obese person has the immune cells that look a lot like what you might expect in an 80-year-old individual,” says Melinda Beck.
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Obese people transmit the virus more easily
When you are obese, “the virus is able to grow to higher concentrations and spread deeper in your lungs,” says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, an infectious disease specialist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
This happened during the 2009 flu pandemic when health officials noticed that people who were significantly overweight were succumbing to influenza at greater rates than the general population.
They were also more likely to spread the disease and to make the flu outbreak even worse.
Schultz-Cherry sites a 2017 study of volunteers at the University of Maryland, which confirmed this finding.
“The students who were overweight or obese actually had more virus coming out in their exhaled breath,” she reports.
Related: Things you probably don’t know about your flu shot
And in 2018, a study comparing obese and nonobese adults with the Influenza A virus found that the obese adults had a 42 percent longer “shedding” time (the duration of time during which they shed influenza virus into the environment through their breath).
Researchers and epidemiologists are sitting up and paying attention to this: Not only can obesity make your flu shot less effective, it can actually make a flu epidemic last longer.
Hope for a better vaccine
The National Institutes of Health is currently funding the development of a flu vaccine that will offer better protection to older and obese people, both of whom have weakened T-cells. Children and pregnant women are also in need of a safer flu shot.
Each year, there’s the question of how effective the flu shot is against the strain of virus that’s showing up that season.
For example, the overall effectiveness of last season’s flu vaccine was only 29 percent, because it failed to protect against a strain of flu virus that appeared later in the season.
The NIH hopes that a new vaccine can be developed that will only have to be given every ten years.
What else can you do to avoid the flu?
Besides getting an annual flu shot, there are ways to reduce your odds of getting the flu:
- Stay at least three feet away from anyone who is coughing or sneezing.
- Keep your hands away from your face, especially your mouth and nose. It’s terribly easy to touch an infected surface like a table or countertop and then transfer the virus to the mucous membranes in your mouth or nose, where they enter your body.
- At least once a day, clean light switches, tables, countertops and other places in your home or workplace that people touch.
- Wash your hands often, especially after touching any of those places.
- Wear surgical gloves if you’re caring for someone who is sick.
- Avoid sharing pillows, blankets, towels, etc. with infected people.
- Keep the windows closed. This may seem counterintuitive. It may seem like a good idea to let fresh air in and germs out. But the flu virus’s outer coating actually hardens in the cold, protecting it and helping it remain infectious as it passes between people.
- Get at least seven hours of sleep a night to strengthen your immune system.
Even given all of this, the flu might get you. If it does, see a doctor asap, respect your need for plenty of sleep and fluids, and try to avoid passing your germs on to the next person.
Sources:
- Excess Weight Can Weaken The Flu Shot — NPR
- Infectious virus in exhaled breath of symptomatic seasonal influenza cases from a college community —
- Obesity Increases the Duration of Influenza A Virus Shedding in Adults — The Journal of Infectious Diseases
- Obesity Impairs the Adaptive Immune Response to Influenza Virus — Annals of the American Thoracic Society
- Morbid Obesity as a Risk Factor for Hospitalization and Death Due to 2009 Pandemic Influenza A(H1N1) Disease — PLOS One
- NIH Scientists Offer Explanation for Winter Flu Season — National Institutes of Health (NIH)
By Joyce Hollman
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