Adults Over 30 Get The Flu Once In Every Five Years; Other Instances Might Just Be From A Common Cold

Adults who are over 30 years old can only get the flu twice in every decade or once in every five years, a recent study published in the PLoS Biology journal said.

"A lot of people say once or twice a year they've got the flu, and that's very unlikely to be true," Dr. Steven Riley, senior author of the study and reader at the Medical Research Council Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College London said as reported by Time.

Researchers from Imperial College London examined the flu antibody levels of blood samples from 151 volunteers from southern China with ages 7 to 81 in from 1968 to 2009. The research wants to find out who are most likely to contact flu and how often it infects a person. It also wanted to find out if how fast it spreads in a community.

As reported by BBC, the study found out that interaction and exposure with other people in a community plays a big role in contacting the disease and children with lots of social interaction got the flu once in every two years.

"In childhood and adolescence, it's more common, possibly because children mix more frequently with other people," Dr. Riley said.

This likelihood grows less as a person grows up and is selective with his/her social interactions. And when a person reaches 30, a pattern of two flu cases per decade has been observed.

However, researchers said that flu or influenza should not be confused with the common colds as both of these illnesses often have the same symptoms such as a rise in body temperature, sore throat, coughing and sneezing.

"There's a lot of debate in the field as to how often people get flu, as opposed to flu-like illness caused by something else. These symptoms can sometimes be caused by common cold viruses," Dr Adam Kucharski said in a report from Daily Mail.

The researchers said that generally flu has worse symptoms including back and muscle pains that will lead people to get more bed rest. Also, flu might lead to far more serious complications among older people.

Meanwhile, Daily Mail said that the research fails to identify differences of symptoms or evidences of flu between men and women.