The influenza virus has become so deadly, due to its ability to mutate seasonally, through a process called reassortment. This involves the recombination of large genetic segments from several viral strains, which causes small genetic changes to be passed on to create a new type of daughter virus (4). Influenza viruses can do this by antigenic drift, which is when” dominant strains from the previous year have changed its surface structure enough to make the effectiveness of the flu vaccine recently developed” (4), greatly diminished. All types of influenza viruses will mutate but unlike DNA viruses, this RNA virus lacks the capability to repair these errors because it does not have a self correcting mechanism (2). Because the influenza
