The flu is, for most patients, only a transient viral infection which causes fever and body aches and disappears after a few days of rest. But every year, children have to be hospitalized because they have a form very serious illness which causes breathing difficulties that can be fatal.
Researchers from the Franco-American Laboratory of Genetics of Infectious Diseases have just discovered that a DNA mutation is responsible for these severe cases of influenza by causing a malfunction in the immune system of children suffering from this genetic anomaly.
Dr Jean-Laurent Casanova and Dr Laurent Abel, both Inserm researchers, and their colleagues at the Franco-American Genetics Laboratory have speculated that severe flu in healthy children may be the result of genetic errors . To verify their hypothesis, the researchers sequenced the genome of a little girl who had contracted influenza A at the age of 2 ½ years, and had to be admitted to a pediatric intensive care unit because of the severity of the disease. They also sequenced the genome of his parents. They discovered that the little girl had inherited from both parents a mutated form of a gene that is usually used to help the immune system fight infections. Due to this double mutation, his gene is inactivated and his immune system cannot fight off a relatively harmless virus like the flu.
While proposing new research, scientists believe that a certain type of drug, recombinant interferons, could help fight severe forms of the flu in all children with a similar genetic mutation.
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