A swine flu golden bullet?

Researchers have done a swine flu study that appears to back up what health officials have theorized: that older people, who’ve been getting the new H1N1 virus at far lower rates than young people, may have some built-in immunity.

The new swine flu, despite its low mortality numbers so far, has officials worried because it is a genetically unique virus that the general population hasn’t been exposed to before. That means that its potential, if it changes into a more virulent form, is deadly.

But despite that uniqueness, the virus hasn’t been raging through what is generally the most vulnerable part of the population to new infections — the elderly.

Only 1 percent of the more than 5,700 probable and confirmed swine flu cases in the U.S. are in people older than 65, and the biggest proportion of infected people are 5 to 24 years old, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A laboratory test revealed that older people have a different antibody in their blood that seems to correlate with the way the swine flu is affecting populations.

Schuchat urged caution against concluding that the antibody provides protection, though. The new H1N1 virus is genetically very different from older strains they’ve examined, she said, but just possibly the immune response that people have to it is similar, providing some protection to people who fought off old viruses.

“We’re wondering whether there might have been some virus around in the ’30s, ’40s or ’50s that might have had some similarity to the one we’re seeing now” in terms of immune response, Schuchat said.

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