Team Members: Khrystyna North, John Huddleston, and Allison Black

What's this visualization all about? As you probably know, in order to be protected from influenza infection, you need to be vaccinated every year, prior to the season when flu starts to circulate. This is because influenza evolves antigenically very quickly; your previous immunity (either from the vaccine, or from the infection) may not protect you against the slightly different viruses that circulate in later flu seasons. The World Health Organization makes recommendations about what the new vaccine strain should be. When choosing the vaccine strain, the WHO wants to pick a virus that, when you're vaccinated with it, will elicit a strong immune response that will protect you from whichever viruses will likely be circulating in the coming season. The strength of this immunity is measured as "titers". The measurements in this dataset are the antigenic distances between different viruses, and different sera, which contain the antibodies that protect you from infection. When this distance is small, your antibodies are very protective. When the distance between a serum and a virus is large, the elicited immunity is not very strong. This graphic aims to help people visualize and explore the distances between viruses and sera, for various combinations of viruses and sera, to help people pick effective vaccine strains.

How can I interact with this visualization? In the below graphic you can see a list of sera, which are named for the virus that that serum is an immune response to. For example, A/HongKong/1/1968 is an influenza A virus that was detected in a person in Hong Kong in 1968. To get the serum, a ferret would have been infected with that virus, and their serum isolated a few days later. For each serum, there are points, which show the antigenic distance between that serum and a panel of viruses that were tested against that serum. Their placement along the x-axis indicates their antigenic distance from the serum. To find out which virus each point is, hover over a point, and information about that virus will appear. Another way to interact with this visualization is by filtering either sera, or viruses, by year. To filter down to sera from a certain year range, click and drag a window over the sera histogram. To filter viruses by year, the same type of selection can be performed on the virus histogram.