Carl Zimmer Flu Quotations

When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.

There is some research that suggests that viruses like the flu are really actually kind of at the razor's edge when it comes to mutation. They're mutating so fast that if they mutated much faster they would actually develop a lot of harmful mutations that could slow them down and cripple them and eventually literally drive them extinct.

We may be sucking in all sorts of viruses and we really don't know the full range of them. Maybe we've got flu virus inside of us. That's a possibility. Maybe we're part flu.