flu shots why all the the hype?
 

whats the deal with these flu shots people are waiting in line for hours, it's almost like the media is getting everybody freaked out about it. The question is DO WE REALLY NEED IT. For me I don't think so! I don't want to get injected with some govt jiz that I have no idea where it came from. seems to me that people that take it yearly are hooked and if they stop taking it, they will get sick. I haven't gotten sick in years! and I have not had any govt jiz injected into me. It amazes me how people can't think for them selves, they just go with the flow like cattle wating to be slaughtered.

I've always had this theory nobody would get the flu if not for paying to get injected with it and then those people giving to everyone who hasnt been shot. They say the vaccine is dead flu, but where does live flu come from in the first place? I dunno much about it, just my paranoid logic, you're right though bunch of guppies.

I dunno. They say 36,000 people die from flu and flu related illness each year.

Why all the hype?

E-L-E-C-T-I-O-N

Nuts, wish I were a virologist but here's what I've learned so far.

Since the flu was around long before vaccines, I'm not sure they'd disappear if we did away with the vaccines. We'd all have to live in bubbles, and then we'd have to put lots of the other animals around us into separate bubbles too.

A virus needs several components to be infectious (e.g., protein coat, genes to make the protein coat, a gene to perhaps make a reverse transcriptase, etc), so a dead virus is just part(s) of a virus but not all of it. After getting vaccinated, your body should see the virus part(s) as foreign and make antibodies, but since not all of the viral components are there you shouldn't actually get infected. [We all know that isolating "dead" viruses hasn't always been perfect in the past...]

These vaccines have to be redone for every flu season because viruses are notorious for mutating.

I'll continue to take my chances without the vaccine, but maybe others really do benefit from it. ??

There's no doubt in my mind that part of it is a huge moneymaking scheme cooked up by America's two, yes two and two only, vaccine providers. :)

Three years ago we got a vaccine which didn't work and lots of people died anyway. They should at least get their money back.

The two-company thing came about when the US gov decided to interfere in the market and treat it as a utility, resulting on zero competition, low profit margins and little incentive for innovation. This allowed foreign companies to profitably enter the subcontracting production market. Where we are today.

Most of the time influenza is a minor inconvenience, unless your immune system is compromised through age or disease. Then flu can be lethal.

Also, it is good to remember that the influenza ("Spanish Flu", look it up) epidemic at the end of WWI killed more soldiers than the war killed and it also killed millions of civilians world-wide. Epidemiological studies revealed that it killed a disproportionate number of young men and women--not the typical pattern of flu.

There is no reason to suppose that it cannot happen again.

Pandemic flu outbreak expected, Canadian Press (Nov 9, 2004)

Toronto — The world is at an unprecedented time in the history of influenza with the threat posed by the current widespread outbreak of the H5N1 avian strain in Asia, a conference on global infectious diseases was told Tuesday.

Few tools exist to contain the virus, which has decimated poultry stocks across broad swaths of Asia and has defied the experts by jumping directly — and with lethal impact — into several species of mammals, including humans.

At least 44 people have been infected with the virus; 32 have died.

“We're very limited in what we can do for this virus,” Dr. David Heymann of the World Health Organization told participants at the two-day conference, organized by the University of Toronto and St. Michael's Hospital's Centre for Global Health Research.

“This virus is rapidly spreading around the world, the fear of course being that H5N1 from chickens will enter a human and . . . reassort to form a human influenza virus which will then have genetic characteristics of a human virus, spread rapidly around the world and cause deaths,” said Dr. Heymann, executive director of the WHO's communicable diseases division.

The process Dr. Heymann was referring to would mark the start of a new influenza pandemic, an event most flu researchers believe is both inevitable and overdue.

In the 400 years of recorded influenza history, pandemics have occurred on a regular if sporadic basis. The longest period between pandemics has been 30 to 40 years, noted Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital.

The last pandemic was 36 years ago, the Hong Kong flu of 1968.

“It's going to happen,” Dr. McGeer told conference delegates. “The only surer things than influenza pandemics are death and taxes.”

A flu pandemic occurs when a strain of influenza to which humans have no innate immunity breaks out of nature and acquires the ability to transmit easily from person to person.

It would sweep the globe within months. Based on the experience of the three pandemics of the 20th century, a third or more of the globe's population would be expected to fall ill. A pandemic, even one caused by a mild strain, would be expected to kill millions, experts warn.

The spectre of a pandemic with the extraordinarily virulent H5N1 strain is making for sleepless nights in the community of influenza researchers.

“There is reason to hope that as these viruses become adapted to humans, that they may become less virulent. But there is absolutely no surety that as they become adapted to humans that they will become less virulent,” Dr. McGeer warned.

“And there remains the possibility that when we face the next pandemic, that we're going to be facing a pandemic that will be as severe as the 1918-19 pandemic.”

That pandemic, more commonly known as the Spanish flu, killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million people worldwide in a mere 18 months.

Experts say the best hope to contain the damage would be vaccine, but vaccine takes months to make. And, as this year's shortage in the United States illustrates, supplies can at best protect a fraction of the world's population. The total global annual production capacity is 260 million doses of flu vaccine.

The WHO has called a summit of vaccine manufacturers for later this week in the hopes of finding ways to ramp up production.

“With influenza we don't have the tools we need today to deal with epidemic influenza,” Dr. Heymann cautioned, referring to the annual outbreaks of flu.

“We certainly don't have them should there be a pandemic.”

Ever notice how all of a sudden the media doesn't care about the flue vaccine anymore? Funny Huh? Predictible actually.

These annual flu vaccines aren't that big a deal, but read the article above and you'll see the point. A vaccine could save millions of lives when (not if) a pandemic flu breaks out.

Could being the operative word, but the last pandemic flue that killed so manny people were not common variants.....and a vacine is good for only one varient......what if another sweeps through, the vaccine isn't good fopr those.

My comment was the Liberal media was only harping that to try to blame Bush, when nobody bought their act they gave up on it. If Bush had allowed contaminated Vaccine to de distributed they would blame him for allowing it, But he blocked bad vacines adn they try to bame him for that. When nobody believed them they dropped the whole issue.

I agree completely. My point is quite separate from yours. To some extent, all these flu vaccines are basically practice for when the real deal shows up. All these years of developing flu vaccines should leave us better prepared than we've been in the past. There hasn't been a pandemic flu in quite a while, but there are some ominous goings on in Asia right now.

Thats true........ but it takes time to gear up and produce a vacine, and guess the right one before its too late. Once its going around its too late.

maybe too late for asia in this case but not so for other continents...

Well it takes months to produce the vaccine in any quantities to my understanding........its takes far less for a traveler to bring it here and spread it. In weeks it could be a major problem. Produce the wrong vaccine for the wrong strain and its all worthless.