Get a flu shot. Wash your hands.

FWIW I never get flu shots and had the opportunity to get one a few weeks ago but declined. I was regretting that decision last week when my temperature was 104 degrees.
 
jesse said:
FWIW I never get flu shots and had the opportunity to get one a few weeks ago but declined. I was regretting that decision last week when my temperature was 104 degrees.
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Sorry to hear that, Jesse. It's a miserable thing.

I personally consider the $29.00 every year for the flu shot to be a good investment.

-Rich
 
ScottM said:
Poliomyelitis is also a viral disease that was wiped out in the late 50s and 60s for all intents and purposes. We do not have a yearly polio vaccine that depends on which strain of polio we guess will be the scourge of the next 12 months. So why is the flu virus so tricky that it cannot be dealt with once and for all? Or is it that our vaccines for that virus are not up to the challenge. Of course the tin foil hat brigade could also throw out that by addressing the flu this way there is far more money to be made by big pharma.
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The influenza virus has a number of chromosomes, or separate genetic elements. That makes it rather easy for strains to exchange bits, especially the coat proteins, which are the first thing seen by our immune system. So the old virus can pick up a new outer shell and be invisible to our immune system, despite being primed with a vaccine for the old virus.

Added to this is the lag in producing flu vaccines. New strains can emerge in the time the vaccine is being prepared for the extant strain.
 
ScottM said:
I understand what they do each year. But that does not answer the question.

Poliomyelitis is also a viral disease that was wiped out in the late 50s and 60s for all intents and purposes. We do not have a yearly polio vaccine that depends on which strain of polio we guess will be the scourge of the next 12 months. So why is the flu virus so tricky that it cannot be dealt with once and for all? Or is it that our vaccines for that virus are not up to the challenge. Of course the tin foil hat brigade could also throw out that by addressing the flu this way there is far more money to be made by big pharma.
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I suspect there's a lot more variation in influenza genomes.

-Rich

EDIT: Or it could be what Michael said while I was posting. :rolleyes:
 
steingar said:
Higher population densities and more personal transportation.
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Is the flu virus more prone (capable?) to mutation? Can those mutations make it more resistant to a vaccine, thereby requiring a different vaccine every year?

Gary
 
steingar said:
Higher population densities and more personal transportation.
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ScottM said:
But those same things have been going on while we have virtually wiped out other diseases. What is different about the flu virus that makes it so hard to control?
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Years ago, those other diseases wiped out the higher population densities.
 
Took the (ahem) opportunity to update my tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis vaccines yesterday. They did ask about flu status ... Maybe shoulda taken care of it while I was at their mercy. :rolleyes:
 
Gary said:
Is the flu virus more prone (capable?) to mutation? Can those mutations make it more resistant to a vaccine, thereby requiring a different vaccine every year?

Gary
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Yes. The chromosomes may switch, thus the proteins outside the virus change quickly. These are what the vaccines primarily respond to. It's sort of like having a getwaway car that you can quickly paint and change plates. The police might see it after you steal from the bank and recognize it thereafter, but once it's painted they probably won't.
 
ScottM said:
I understand what they do each year. But that does not answer the question.

Poliomyelitis is also a viral disease that was wiped out in the late 50s and 60s for all intents and purposes. We do not have a yearly polio vaccine that depends on which strain of polio we guess will be the scourge of the next 12 months. So why is the flu virus so tricky that it cannot be dealt with once and for all? Or is it that our vaccines for that virus are not up to the challenge. Of course the tin foil hat brigade could also throw out that by addressing the flu this way there is far more money to be made by big pharma.
Click to expand...

Once you get a shot, or contracted polio and lived, you won't get it again. I assume it does not mutate like the flu virus. You can get the flu every year. Some strains are close and you will have the benifits from that exposure minimize the effects of another, but that is hit and miss. Get the flu shot, the needles are small. ;)


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...on-sick-elderly-flu-deaths-workplace/1823425/
 
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Ted DuPuis said:
This is why I don't get flu shots. I prefer to make my immune system do something now and then, anyway. Keep its proficiency up. ;)
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Are you saying that flu shots don't trigger the same reaction from the immune system as live viruses?

Ted DuPuis said:
Not scared of needles - I just know enough about vaccines to know what I want and what I don't, plus why. Note: I don't tell others not to, just say that I have my reasons why I don't. If you can't respect that, then I'll resume badgering your fake, overpriced airplanes. ;)
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Your first post suggests you either don't understand vaccines - or you don't agree with commonly accepted biological mechanism at play.

Ted DuPuis said:
I look at it as the "luddite" stage. :)

I have my philosophical as well as statistical/engineering reasons. Like I said, I do not presume to tell anyone else what to do, I just know what I choose to do and why. :)
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I would like to know specifically what your reasons are for not getting a flu shot. You seem to be claiming to have defensible rational reasons, so I think you should state them. This seems as good a thread as any to do that.
 
To be honest, I don't get flu shots either, mostly due to my antipathy toward those things medical (still don't have the %$!%$!#!! gout letter from my damn physician, and I've been nothing but nice!). I wouldn't dissuade anyone from obtaining one, though. And I don't mix that much with the public, so I am not as prone to infection as some.
 
I see that the 14 year old who died in Minnesota today, had a shot.

I don't see it as a reason to get or not get a shot.

Sometimes the roulette wheel of life spins and you lose. Heartbreaking.
 
steingar said:
To be honest, I don't get flu shots either, mostly due to my antipathy toward those things medical (still don't have the %$!%$!#!! gout letter from my damn physician, and I've been nothing but nice!). I wouldn't dissuade anyone from obtaining one, though. And I don't mix that much with the public, so I am not as prone to infection as some.
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Agreed.
 
With prior immunities, aren't the odds the same (one-out-of-three) either way?

I started to smell a rat a few years ago when they ran all the same PSA's and news stories touting the need for the vaccine and then ran out of serum. Suddenly the tone changed and the NIH lackeys started back-tracking with "well, don't worry, even you seniors are OK, yada yada yada.

Which is it?

bbchien said:
There are actually 3 strains making the rounds this year. They got 2 of them covered in the vaccine. 65% isn't that bad.
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steingar said:
To be honest, I don't get flu shots either, mostly due to my antipathy toward those things medical (still don't have the %$!%$!#!! gout letter from my damn physician, and I've been nothing but nice!). I wouldn't dissuade anyone from obtaining one, though. And I don't mix that much with the public, so I am not as prone to infection as some.
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Wait, I thought you taught classes?

Personally, teaching two lecture sections plus two lab sections, I wouldn't think of trying to get through the year without a flu shot. I've thought about getting the pneumococcus vaccine too, and lately I've even started thinking about the shingles. Earlier this winter I had a weird respiratory virus for a few days that seemed to morph into something intestinal, and around the same time I had a patch on my left side that felt like it was badly sunburned. I expected it to start breaking out and self-grounded until I felt better, but it just went away by itself.
 
wabower said:
With prior immunities, aren't the odds the same (one-out-of-three) either way?

I started to smell a rat a few years ago when they ran all the same PSA's and news stories touting the need for the vaccine and then ran out of serum. Suddenly the tone changed and the NIH lackeys started back-tracking with "well, don't worry, even you seniors are OK, yada yada yada.

Which is it?
Click to expand...

That's also part of my reasoning. There's a lot of touting about the flu shot every year (a very lucrative industry for many people). But the flu shot is a guess, which means it can be wrong. So if we're saying this year's shot got 2/3, you have 66%.

Then you factor in that vaccines don't have 100% effectiveness on anyone. It will work better on some than others. Let's say it's 75% effective for easy math - now you're down to 50% from 66%. So Jesse can say he wishes he got a flu shot, and it may have helped. It also may not have. I forget what the exact effectiveness number is for flu vaccine.

At that point, I'll take my chances.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
This is why I don't get flu shots. I prefer to make my immune system do something now and then, anyway. Keep its proficiency up. ;)
Click to expand...

Ya may want to check with Robert's Peds doc and see if you getting the flu shot may help protect him from the virus, Herd Immunity and all ya know. I was amazed at how my young and invinciable attitude changed upon becoming a father. Your choice of course and not suggesting otherwise but never hurts to ask his doc. Information is good.

gismo said:
I read it on the internet. It must be true.
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Yes I'm a French Model "Bonjour":rofl:

As an attorney I am always in public places that are literal incubators for this crap, Courthouses, Public Meetings and Prisons. Copius amounts of Purell are applied after visting each especially prisons. A flu shot is a must for me.
 
An interesting thread and and good reading! Couldn't do this on the damn Red Board without it getting locked down!:nono:

it's nice to be here!!!!!
 
I started getting flu shots when it was strongly suggested at work since I have a lot of contact with people, and at the time, with patients too. It also helped that they had people giving shots on the premises for free.

Before that (and even now)I hated going to doctors and would not go just for a flu shot. I guess it never occurred to me that they give them at Walgreens, etc. Or is that a new thing in the past 10-15 years?
 
AdamZ said:
Ya may want to check with Robert's Peds doc and see if you getting the flu shot may help protect him from the virus, Herd Immunity and all ya know. I was amazed at how my young and invinciable attitude changed upon becoming a father. Your choice of course and not suggesting otherwise but never hurts to ask his doc. Information is good.
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I wasn't aware I was lacking information. ;)
 
No flu shot for me, but definitely wash the hands between people. Unfortunately I'm in one of the dirtiest professions, IT. When I used to be the onsite tech and touched many people's computers a day I would sanitize between client's keyboards. But frankly it wasn't for me, but just to avoid passing things between clients.

But then again, I'm bordering on believing we over vaccinate and over treat. Wash your hands and keep them out of your face goes a long long way as any teacher will tell you.
 
Ted DuPuis said:
I wasn't aware I was lacking information. ;)
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Don't know that you are but it was just a suggestion from one friend to another. I had lots of "holy crap I never thought about that" moments when I had an infant.

Kind of like "what the hell do you mean I can't give a 3 month old honey"? :yikes:
 
steingar said:
The influenza virus has a number of chromosomes, or separate genetic elements. That makes it rather easy for strains to exchange bits, especially the coat proteins, which are the first thing seen by our immune system. So the old virus can pick up a new outer shell and be invisible to our immune system, despite being primed with a vaccine for the old virus.

Added to this is the lag in producing flu vaccines. New strains can emerge in the time the vaccine is being prepared for the extant strain.
Click to expand...
Just curious, how many more chromosomes does the flu virus have than the polio virus?

Is it just that the flu continues to vary quickly that we cannot get enough vaccine out to killed it completely?
 
I got the flu vaccine this year for the first time in my life because my wife is pregnant and I don't want to risk passing something on to her.
 
New York City resident, ride the subway every day of the work week. Yes I got the flu shot! -Skip

PS: caught the current long-duration cold that is going around over Christmas from my dirt-ball four year old grandson. When they are sick, you get sick!
 
ScottM said:
Just curious, how many more chromosomes does the flu virus have than the polio virus?

Is it just that the flu continues to vary quickly that we cannot get enough vaccine out to killed it completely?
Click to expand...

According to this site, the 1981 poliovirus was sequenced and was found to have 7411 nucleotides (that seems awfully short.) I do not know how many gene coding sequences that it contains, though they do actually show the entire sequence on that web page:

http://amhistory.si.edu/polio/virusvaccine/pgenome.htm

On the other hand it looks like the nucleotide sequences in pneumonia strains number in the millions ("... the 6 million nucleotides that make up the K. pneumoniae genome" from http://www.genome.gov/27549852)

So if I found reasonably correct numbers, it looks like pneumonia has on the order of a thousand times more genes that can permute, making it that much more variable.
 
Everskyward said:
I started getting flu shots when it was strongly suggested at work since I have a lot of contact with people, and at the time, with patients too. It also helped that they had people giving shots on the premises for free.

Before that (and even now)I hated going to doctors and would not go just for a flu shot. I guess it never occurred to me that they give them at Walgreens, etc. Or is that a new thing in the past 10-15 years?
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If even that much. I think it's only about five years or so in New York that pharmacists have been allowed to do it. I think they're allowed to administer the pneumonia shot, too. No idea about shingles.

-Rich
 
Jim Logajan said:
So if I found reasonably correct numbers, it looks like pneumonia has on the order of a thousand times more genes that can permute, making it that much more variable.
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Yes. Flu is constantly mutating, unlike polio or smallpox. Flu is constantly varying and passing gene sequences among themselves (called genetic drift), so the "match" between the vaccine and the virus degrades over time.

Also, the lead time to make vaccines requires that CDC/WHO choose which strains will be the dominant strains and to incorporate into the vaccine months before the vaccine is actually available.
Most times they get it right, sometimes they miss (which is why the vaccine this year gets two of the three strains, the third one popped up after the vaccine was in production).

With static viruses (polio, smallpox, etc), vaccination can nearly eliminate them. Viruses that mutate (flu, cold, HIV, etc) can't.
 
PilotAlan said:
Yes. Flu is constantly mutating, unlike polio or smallpox. Flu is constantly varying and passing gene sequences among themselves (called genetic drift), so the "match" between the vaccine and the virus degrades over time.

Also, the lead time to make vaccines requires that CDC/WHO choose which strains will be the dominant strains and to incorporate into the vaccine months before the vaccine is actually available.
Most times they get it right, sometimes they miss (which is why the vaccine this year gets two of the three strains, the third one popped up after the vaccine was in production).

With static viruses (polio, smallpox, etc), vaccination can nearly eliminate them. Viruses that mutate (flu, cold, HIV, etc) can't.
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First, I need to correct a mistake I made in the post you responded to: I went looking for pneumonia, which was a mistake since that describes an inflammatory condition caused by either a virus or a bacteria. The 6 million nucleotide number I found is for a bacteria, not a virus.

On looking up influenza, Wikipedia's page seems to give a reasonable summary here of H1N1, H1N2, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthomyxoviridae

According to that page, the nucleotide sequence length of influenza viri is on the order of 12,000 to 15,000 nt (nucleotides).

(Their web page on poliovirus confirms the ~7500 nt for that virus.)

That makes the average flu virus at most two times longer than polio. That doesn't change the basic idea that the longer virus may mutate faster. The Wikipedia pages for the two classes use different units of measurement for mutation rate, and I'm a layman on this subject and not sure the proper way to convert them to the same set of units.

For polio they say: "The mutation rate in the virus is relatively high even for an RNA virus with a synonymous substitution rate of 1.0 x 10−2 substitutions/site/year and non synonymous substitution rate of 3.0 x 10−4 substitutions/site/year."

While for influenza they say: "Since RNA proofreading enzymes are absent, the RNA-dependent RNA transcriptase makes a single nucleotide insertion error roughly every 10 thousand nucleotides, which is the approximate length of the influenza vRNA. Hence, nearly every newly-manufactured influenza virus will contain a mutation in its genome."
 
AdamZ said:
Don't know that you are but it was just a suggestion from one friend to another. I had lots of "holy crap I never thought about that" moments when I had an infant.

Kind of like "what the hell do you mean I can't give a 3 month old honey"? :yikes:
Click to expand...

*sigh*

I was hoping that someone would have gotten the joke.
 
RJM62 said:
If even that much. I think it's only about five years or so in New York that pharmacists have been allowed to do it. I think they're allowed to administer the pneumonia shot, too. No idea about shingles.
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I know I've seen pharmacies in Colorado advertising the shingles vaccine. I don't know about pneumonia. If they want public compliance with flu and other shots it's probably a good thing they give them at pharmacies now.
 
Jim Logajan said:
Are you saying that flu shots don't trigger the same reaction from the immune system as live viruses?
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It's been pretty widely accepted that, while that is the intent, it doesn't work with 100% efficacy. Also, not all vaccines are live virus vaccines, and even the live virus vaccines are specifically designed to limit the effectiveness of the virus itself.

Your first post suggests you either don't understand vaccines - or you don't agree with commonly accepted biological mechanism at play.
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The issue is that, while the biological mechanism does work, it is also known that it doesn't work for the entire population, and doesn't work with 100% efficacy. IOW, getting a shot doesn't guarantee immunity by itself.

I would like to know specifically what your reasons are for not getting a flu shot. You seem to be claiming to have defensible rational reasons, so I think you should state them. This seems as good a thread as any to do that.
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There are two sets of reasons, technical and philosophical. On the technical side, the flu shot is a guess at which strains it will try to protect you from. This means they may get it right, they may get it wrong. Most likely they'll get it partially right. This, by itself, reduces its potential effectiveness. Furthermore, vaccines don't have 100% effectiveness anyway on anyone, and what the level of effectiveness is depends on a number of factors. This means that if you get the vaccine, it may do something for you, it may not. What's interesting is the studies that indicate that the flu vaccine may not be effective in the age groups for which it's commonly stated need the vaccine the most.

I have issues with certain ingredients that are put in a number of vaccines. The primary one in certain flu vaccines is thimerosol (mercury). While the industry has said that the small levels of thimerosol that is placed in vaccines as a preservative don't have any negative impacts, I don't believe that's something that can be said with the level of certainty that they are stating. What I do know is that I don't want mercury in my bloodstream.

On the philosophical side, I believe that we as a society overvaccinate and overmedicate. While I do believe modern medicine is a good thing (certainly it has saved the life of loved ones, including my mother when she had her bout with cancer 14 years ago), there is a tendency to try to prevent any suffering whatsoever through pills and shots, which defies a major part of life. To me, the biggest purpose of a vaccine is trying to eradicate a disease from society, which is a noble thought. We've been successful with this for smallpox and polio. For reasons Michael has stated, we will not be successful with flu due to its mutations.

As far as big pharma is concerned, they are a necessary evil if we wish to see new medications and vaccines. However, the trend is to make new medications that improve convenience rather than actually try to prevent illnesses and death, which I have a philosophical disagreement with. The ones that we have that try to prevent illnesses and death are not seeing the level of relentless improvement that I would like to see. While I won't claim that I take philosophical argument with how many vaccines are made (although I'm sure many of you would take issue with the vaccines being produced using an aborted fetus, of which there are several), I do take issue with certain ingredients used that I don't believe are optimal, and I don't see any rush from the industry to try to find ingredients that are better suited. Because of this, I don't have any desire to support an industry that I believe is lazy and doesn't have its priorities where I'd like to see them. Consider this like not wanting to buy Lycoming parts because you disagree with their philosophy on LOP operations - it's not much different.

Our bodies do a good job at what they are supposed to do overall. So, as for me, I would rather let it do its job in the majority of cases. That doesn't mean that I refuse all vaccinations, medications, etc. I went and got my Tdap booster a few months back because we are having pertussis outbreaks here in Ohio, and someone like me who turns wrenches should have a tetanus booster. Not thrilled with the aluminum in the shot, but I considered that worth the risk/benefit.

But, I get the flu, I get sick. I don't get sick often. When I do (about once a year), it's significant enough to take me out of commission for a couple of days. It's part of life, and so I deal with it. I believe my body is better off for it, and the evidence I've seen suggests that I'm not wrong.

As I've already stated, I don't presume to tell anyone else what to do, so I get annoyed with the posts and billboards saying "Get your flu shot!" and the general implication from many that you're somehow irresponsible or uneducated if you don't. Meanwhile, there are plenty of reasons why one might choose not to. Like with everything else, one should be educated and make his or her own decision. Interestingly, most of my friends who are opting not to get a flu shot are among the more educated and more intelligent of the folks I know.
 
wait, why can't you give a 3month old honey?

And i didn't know that Adam is a french model! He does a very good job covering up the accent.
 
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