After the coronavirus vaccine, the mRNA vaccine of the US drugmaker Moderna is now showing hope for treating flu as well.
For the first time in the world, researchers have made such a vaccine using the genetic material messenger RNA, which they claim will help prevent any kind of flu, such as influenza and pneumonia.
The Covid vaccine was also made using the genetic material RNA; researchers saw a ray of hope then.
They had said this mRNA vaccine could in future also work against cancer. The results of the experimental use of Moderna’s new vaccine suggest that hope was not entirely baseless.
Moderna’s new flu vaccine uses mRNA technology. It has been made for the elderly; Moderna says the vaccine is for those aged 50 or above.
In old age, influenza or pneumonia infections can become life-threatening. Ordinary flu vaccines cannot always prevent infection, so the vaccine has been made with messenger RNA, which stimulates the body to produce more antibodies.
For the first time in the world, a flu vaccine has been made with mRNA technology — the same technology now being used to make cancer vaccines. The vaccine is named “mFlusiva”.
It has initially been approved for those aged 50 to 64, it is learnt. Approval has also been sought for those aged 65 or above.
Trials showed the new vaccine is far more capable of preventing the virus than ordinary flu vaccines, and it is claimed it can also prevent infections from multiple strains of the influenza virus.
A study by AIIMS in Delhi, India, had found that people under five or over 65 are the most affected by pneumonia worldwide.
The death rate from the disease is highest among them. A count of ICU patients at any hospital in India would show that 65–70 percent of beds are occupied by elderly people suffering from pneumonia and respiratory illness.
Of them, 30 percent are patients of “invasive pneumonia”, in which the disease’s germs spread through the blood and body fluids to other parts of the body and the patient develops sepsis.
So pneumonia is dangerous in old age. Researchers say that if this vaccine proves effective, the risk of elderly people contracting viral diseases will fall considerably.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report