FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: Keith Whitener on December 01, 2009, 01:08:55 AM
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It's available for free at Rutgers on Wednesday. What are the FOT's' thoughts on this? I'm thinking of getting it.
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nay. If you happen to catch the flu, ride it out like nature intended. Don't buy into that TV News/ CIA Mind Control voodoo bullshit.
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Aren't children and elderly still being denied the vaccine? They offered it the other week at the big business I work at, and I was a little upset that people are still dying from the flu yet we can offer the vaccine to keep people at work for three days. Unless I missed that the vaccine isn't as limited as it was a month ago.
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I got it a few weeks ago at my college. I have never gotten any flu vaccine before (I'm 20) before and have only caught the flu maybe once that I can remember. That being said, people in the college age bracket are apparently at high risk for fatality, so I got it.
It was kinda weird since it was the kind they spray up your nose. I felt like I had phlegm running down the back of my throat for about an hour afterwards, so if you have a bad sneeze or gag reflex, that might be something to think about.
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I have the opportunity to have it injected into me. Also, suppositories are available.
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Yay. I had the shot last week. Everybody's getting it here. Don't buy into that TV News/ CIA Mind Control voodoo bullshit.
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On the one hand you have the consensus of the scientific community, on the other hand you have Bill Mahr, teabaggers, and "concerned parents." Hmmmm.
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If I understand correctly, the fatality rate for Swine Flu is not substantially different from any other common strain, it's just concentrated on a different demographic. Someone straighten me out if I'm wrong here. The real difference this year is that we're being hit by two flu strains at once -- H1N1 and whatever other one was due this season.
Nevertheless I think getting the vaccine is a good idea. You're not just saving yourself, you're contributing to overall reduction in the spread of the virus.
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Yay.
I got my kids vaccinated.
My girlfriend from high school was on Facebook ranting about not getting her kids vaccinated after reading about the deaths from the swine flu vaccination in the 1970's. I think she fails to recognize that there will always be deaths associated with vaccination. But are the odds of death higher with the vaccination or without it? That is the question one has to answer.
Or maybe I disagree with her because she is my ex-girlfriend.
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If I remember my microbiology correctly, since the vaccine is a weakened strain, I guess you're still getting infected with the disease, so there could be complications form that. Also, there may be complications due to egg allergies. Apparently people complain about guillon barre after getting vaccines but I think I remember our prof saying that the number who get the syndrome after the vaccine isn't statistically significant to suggest a link.
Personally, I got it because I my classes are so intense, with my fast approaching graduation, that I can't really afford to miss any days that getting flu might put me out for. I'm not above going to class sick, but if I'm hit hard enough that I can't go, then it's a loss. Additionally, my mom had been bugging me about getting it. So I did.
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The flu shot and the H1N1 shot are different shots. H1N1 is actually the same strain as the Spanish Influenza. In reality, it's no different than any other flu except that it attacks the young and healthy, not infants and elderly, and that it weakens your immunities, but more on that in a sec.
Depending on how you take the vaccine, it will effect how contagious you are. Intravenously, it's a dead, inactive strain. If you take the nasal spray you're receiving a live strain. Although it will be harmless to you, you will be contagious for a few days afterwards, so please be aware of what you're going to be doing in those days. People won't be dropping in your wake, but you have to be careful of where you're sneezing, whose hand you are shaking and how often you're washing your hands.
What's underlying the H1N1 concerns isn't that if you get it, there's no coming back. The CDC is looking ahead to the next pandemic, and that's the Avian flu. That never went away and even though the hysteria around it has cooled, it's still a countdown until that becomes a pandemic. Why it's relevant is because if you've had H1N1, you're twice as likely to contract the Avian version, for which there is no cure. The more people who are vaccinated against H1N1, the more people won't have the wrecked immunities that will make the Avian flu worse than it could be.
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Yay. I had the shot last week. Everybody's getting it here. Don't buy into that TV News/ CIA Mind Control voodoo bullshit.
(http://kickthebobo.com/h1n1.jpg)
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Yay (for me). My wife is a family nurse practitioner and sees 20+ patients a day. She comes into contact with everything under the sun and will then bring it home. To ME! So I did get the shot.
If my wife didn't come into contact with so many ill people, I would have probably skipped it. I am not a big fan of medicating myself and avoid it when I can.
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Vaccination it is!
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What's underlying the H1N1 concerns isn't that if you get it, there's no coming back. The CDC is looking ahead to the next pandemic, and that's the Avian flu. That never went away and even though the hysteria around it has cooled, it's still a countdown until that becomes a pandemic. Why it's relevant is because if you've had H1N1, you're twice as likely to contract the Avian version, for which there is no cure. The more people who are vaccinated against H1N1, the more people won't have the wrecked immunities that will make the Avian flu worse than it could be.
I remember hearing maybe 3 or 4 years ago that the "good" news about the avian flu is that it has to mutate WAY down so that it can really be effective as a pandemic. By mutate down, I mean become much less deadly. I think It was at like 80% death rate then, the dude said it needed to get into the oughts. That's still a much higher death rate than regular flu.
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Here's how I decided:
Imagine that you are heading down the road, about to cross through an intersection. Green light for you. As you are about at the crossroads, you notice another car heading in from your left, oblivious of the red light. Now answer quickly without analyzing. Do you:
A. Speed up
B. Hit the brakes
Think about what your answer says about who you are and apply what you have learned to question at hand.
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I got it a few weeks ago at my college. There were at least 5-7 cases of H1N1 that I know of on our campus earlier during the semester.
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i'm with bobo.
there's a fine line to walk when trusting the "scientific community".
where's fredericks when you need him?
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What made me lean strongly toward yay was Spoony's comment.
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My wife got the vaccine and within 24 hours had a horrible cold and a pounding migraine that lasted for 4 days. I didn't and I haven't been sick since last year.
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So, the vaccine must not be as limited as it was a month ago huh?
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(http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/3839/swineki.jpg) (http://img40.imageshack.us/i/swineki.jpg/)
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(http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/3839/swineki.jpg) (http://img40.imageshack.us/i/swineki.jpg/)
So you're against it?
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There is sound scientific logic for immunization. Fear has been driving some poor decision making in Canada...supplies running short, how the media covered the issue, people jumping to the front of the line. Consult your physician if unsure what to do, act accordingly.
Below is an article from cbc.ca website that I thought made good sense considering all of the information from print and tv news services.
Public health officials and journalists have overstated the importance of the swine flu, a former Ontario chief medical officer of health says.
Dr. Richard Schabas, chief medical officer of health for Hastings and Prince Edward Counties in eastern Ontario, said the H1N1 influenza outbreak needs to be put into proper perspective.
About 200,000 people die in Canada every year from all causes combined, including about 4,000 from seasonal flu.
"By the time all the dust has settled on H1N1, somewhere between 200 and 300 people will have died in this country," Schabas said Thursday during a panel on media coverage of H1N1 on CBC News The National.
Schabas criticized the media for not trying to put the story into perspective, and for being "a little too easy to spin sometimes" by public health officials.
"I'm not letting the media off the hook totally, but I think the real villains of the piece here have been those public health officials who have consistently overplayed and overstated the importance of what is happening," he said.
"By the time all is said and done, this is not a major public health event, but you'd never know that from what some people are saying."
13-year-old's death
The panel also looked at the front-page coverage given to the death of Evan Frustaglio, a 13-year-old hockey player from Toronto. Evan died on the eve of the H1N1 vaccine becoming available, and demand for the vaccine jumped overnight, catching health officials by surprise.
"It was very clear when we were reporting the lines that most of the people in there did say, 'We came because we saw the story about that little boy,' " CBC reporter Ioanna Roumeliotis said.
Evan's death and his grieving father's plea to parents to consider vaccinating their children was a tremendous human interest story, agreed Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.
But "I'm quite sure that the people who were reporting that didn't necessarily think about what the consequences of that would be or the context that was in," McGeer said. "What we saw afterwards was that it caused an enormous amount of fear and anxiety that we would all like not to have seen."
A healthy child in Canada is about 20 times more likely to be killed by a car than by the H1N1 virus, Schabas said, but that isn't going to make the national news.
"Children actually die of flu every year and a few more die of H1N1. This was not unexpected, and the way it was presented — as if this was a sudden bolt out of the blue, some change in our perspective of H1N1 — that's what created the anxiety. It was the way it was presented."
Link to original article:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/11/06/h1n1-media.html
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So, the vaccine must not be as limited as it was a month ago huh?
My wife works in health care, they provided vaccines for the staff. I'm not anti vaccine but she did have a bad reaction to it. I've never had a flu shot in my life though and I've never had the flu so I just don't feel that it's necessary.
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The good old fashioned flu is deadly, this is a joke in comparison, but America seems to enjoy living in fear.
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The good old fashioned flu is deadly, this is a joke in comparison, but America seems to enjoy living in fear.
You should get the regular flu shot every year, too--especially if you work in an office environment, by the way. I'm not sure that the people in this thread suggested that this flu is much worse.
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What Spoony said...yay Spoony!
What's underlying the H1N1 concerns isn't that if you get it, there's no coming back. The CDC is looking ahead to the next pandemic, and that's the Avian flu. That never went away and even though the hysteria around it has cooled, it's still a countdown until that becomes a pandemic. Why it's relevant is because if you've had H1N1, you're twice as likely to contract the Avian version, for which there is no cure. The more people who are vaccinated against H1N1, the more people won't have the wrecked immunities that will make the Avian flu worse than it could be.
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The good old fashioned flu is deadly, this is a joke in comparison, but America seems to enjoy living in fear.
You should get the regular flu shot every year, too--especially if you work in an office environment, by the way. I'm not sure that the people in this thread suggested that this flu is much worse.
Didn't say they did, it's an overall thing.
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Spoony is right about everything!
I always get the flu shot and I got this one too. A lot of people in my family have super bad allergies/asthma/weak immune systems for other reasons and as a result I think it's bullshit when people say things like "I don't usually get sick so I'm just not going to bother." You're not the only person in the universe. If you can do something that will prevent you from getting contagiously sick in some way, do it.
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Vaccinininated!
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Yay! I got it from my grandparents' doctor- my school doesn't have it (except in extremely limited numbers for those with serious health conditions... like AIDS or missing an organ) and probably won't for months, if at all. They probably would have made me come get it anyway, but I have asthma which is one of the preexisting conditions that can become serious. And college is a ridiculously good environment for viruses to spread.
It's not even about your own well-being- it's about protecting others. If you get H1N1, you may only get mildly ill, but you can spread it to someone who's more susceptible or can't get the vaccine due to an egg allergy, etc.
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Nay for me. I don't think I've ever gotten a flu shot - my thinking is if I get the shot I probably will get sick. I don't even remember the last time I had the flu. I usually get sick from something else, and usually only once a year - this year was Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease (aka coxsackie virus), which I got from my daughter, and apparently I had never been exposed to as a child so, like chickenpox, it was a million times worse getting as an adult. No vaccine/cure for it, just had to ride it out. But I take my vitamins, drink lots of water, tea (no coffee), wash my hands (and try not to touch my face/eyes with unwashed hands), and go to bed at reasonable hour. When I get sick I have the good sense to stay home. It's just how I roll.
Oh, and cough/sneeze into the crook of your elbow, you germ crop dusting bastards.
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Yea for my wife, because she's pregnant (yay!), although we did debate it for a while. She got it today and isn't feeling so well.
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Yea for my wife, because she's pregnant (yay!), although we did debate it for a while. She got it today and isn't feeling so well.
The nurse who administered it said it take two weeks for it to work, so if she doesn't feel well today it is unrelated to the shot.
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Yea for my wife, because she's pregnant (yay!), although we did debate it for a while. She got it today and isn't feeling so well.
The nurse who administered it said it take two weeks for it to work, so if she doesn't feel well today it is unrelated to the shot.
My guess is that the two weeks is the time it takes to provide immunity to the virus. I'm pretty sure it could have other physiological effects prior to that. There seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence of people feeling crummy for a couple of days after getting any flu shot (though I guess this could be a placebo effect.)
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My guess is that the two weeks is the time it takes to provide immunity to the virus. I'm pretty sure it could have other physiological effects prior to that.
You are correct on both fronts.
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Yes, I was bed-ridden for about a day after getting the flu shot. Got in on a Saturday, was down and out on Sunday, felt pretty good on Monday (and now: great). I was told it's a very common, text book side effect of the vaccine.