Immune Health

Virus Variants: What You Need To Know To Stay Safe

Variants. 

They’re all over the news, and the headlines are pretty alarming.

But the truth is that you’ve been dealing with virus variants your whole life. They're the reason you’ll get dozens of colds over your lifetime. And why the CDC pushes a new flu shot every year.

That’s just the way viruses work: they mutate and change to escape detection by your immune system. And each time they change, your body has to learn to cope with the new versions.

Thankfully, with a little insight into how to arm your body with extra support, your immune system will be able to manage whatever new virus variants come along.

Viruses Create Variants to Outsmart Your Immune System

If there’s one thing that’s constant about viruses, it’s that they constantly change to create new variants. Some of those variants will disappear without even a blip, while others survive for the long haul.

Sometimes a change makes the virus spread more easily, so more people can catch it. Some changes make a virus more infectious, and some can make it less infectious. There are other ways that viruses can change, but all the mutations have something in common: Their number one goal is to evade your immune system and make you sick.

But no matter what kind of variant a virus throws at you, a healthy immune system will eventually figure out how to eliminate them. At the first sign of any antigen (an invading microbe like a pathogen or virus,) a well-functioning body will immediately begin drafting a plan of attack... And all good battle plans typically start with antibodies – special Y-shaped proteins designed to recognize, tag, and show antigens the door.

Your antibodies (also known as immunoglobulins) collect information about the new variant threat so your body can figure out how to defeat it. And the more immunoglobulins your body has available, the quicker your body can come up with an effective response.

Unfortunately, some virus variants can make that process extremely difficult…

coronavirus variants

Drift and Shift: How Viruses Make Things Difficult

Viruses can mutate in two different ways: through drift or through shift.

The first way – called antigenic drift – brings about very small gradual changes in the virus by altering the proteins on its surface. At first, the mutated virus will still be close enough to the original virus that your immune system can recognize and easily fight it off.

Over time, though, all of those small changes add up, causing the virus variants to drift further away from the original. When a big enough antigenic drift occurs, your body may not be able to immediately recognize the new variant and neutralize it. This type of variant is the reason you can get sick from colds and flu every year, but you can also recover fairly quickly. 

The second way – called antigenic shift – creates a huge sudden change in an existing virus. These variants will be unrecognizable to your immune system. And while this type of mutation is much less common, it can make many more people sick.  

But whether your body has to deal with a drift or shift variant, healthy support from your immunoglobulin team can help meet and defeat it.

How Your Immune System Reacts to Variants

Whenever your immune system senses a threat, it sends out immunoglobulin troops as the first line of defense.