I understand immunity but from my understanding, the influenza virus changes pretty quickly.
How can I be in close proximity to my wife and not catch a flu that puts her down for 3 days? Or when I get a flu where I feel like I’m dying she is fine?
In: Biology
If you are careful to wash your hands and keep infected things from your mucous membranes, then your chances of exposure are reduced. When you don’t know someone is infected, you don’t always take the necessary precautions.
Not every infection resulted in a noticeable illness. It’s called subclinical infection. Basically, your immune system usually knocks down the infection, but something like 25% of the time it’s too slow or inefficient and you get clinical symptoms. The pathogen also varies, but you and your wife can be exposed to the same infectious agent and have different results because of your personal immune response.
There’s a lot of chance involved. Maybe you just never got enough of it in your system, by luck. Maybe your body developed enough immunity from the slight but constant exposure that you never got sick. It’s effectively random.
Same, my sister had chickenpox once (we both didn’t get the vaccine at the time) and I remember rubbing myself against her because I wanted to stay home too. I touched her, we slept in the same bed, etc and never happened. Interesting.
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