You’ve probably had friends or coworkers come down with “the plague”. It’s not the real yersinia pestis, it’s actually just the influenza virus. I’ve been trying to figure out for the past week what’s been going on with me. Last Friday, I got the really bad sinus pain everyone has gotten but I felt better. Then this past Friday, I started with the hacking cough people have been getting, however, I still felt good. Yesterday, I got really tired and felt as if I had a mild fever. Today, my cough went away, but I still feel tired. Weird. I’ve been ingesting thousands of mg of vitamin C a day, and I don’t know if that made a diffrence. All I can do is wait and see what happens.

So, how does the influenza virus infect our cells? Here’s an animation from the Rediscovering Biology textbook.