What Are The Three Main Types Of Influenza

There are many people that wonder how the common cold affects some and not others as badly. The truth is that the correct question should be what are the three main types of influenza?

Typically Influenza Type A or IA is undoubtedly the most common of all three types and unfortunately also the most deadly of the 3 influenza types. The reality is that Influenza Type A is responsible for the deadliest pandemics in history. The next is called Influenza Type B. Though this also has resulted in numerous flu and cold virus outbreaks and a few epidemics the virus is much milder as a disease than its counterpart type A.

Finally the Influenza Type C viruses is a much weaker strain to Types A and B and has never caused a global pandemic; it is associated mainly with respiratory infections and other ailments that are common symptoms of the common cold.

However we chose to elaborate further on the Influenza Type A, as it was the most dangerous.
An influenza infection is a drama of subversion played out at the microscopic level of the cell. A virus particle enters the respiratory system, insinuates its way into a healthy cell and makes it produce copies of the virus. After about six hours, hundreds of new flu particles launch themselves into the respiratory channels.

A particle of influenza A—the commonest, most severe type —has several structural features to help it do its work. Up to 1 ,000 spikes of protein compounds grow from its surface. There are two kinds of compound. One, hemagglutinin, matches a protein on the host cell’s surface, as a key matches a lock, opening the cell for invasion. The other kind of spike, neuraminidase, clears the virus surface of a substance that otherwise makes it stick to other particles, producing a clump too big to squeeze into a cell. We hope that this has aided in answering the question what are the three main types of influenza.

Another feature unique to the flu virus—one that helps make it a formidable opponent—lies in the genetic material that controls its reproduction. In the flu virus the genes consist of eight separate pieces (in a common-cold virus the genetic material is one continuous strand). Each time a flu-virus particle reproduces itself, the eight new genes must form the correct pattern. Occasionally a mutation occurs, producing genes with a slightly different molecular makeup. If this strain prospers, a new variety of virus arises: not a totally different, pandemic-causing breed, but one distinct enough to resist vaccines that protected against its forebears.

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