Slashdot Mirror
For Some Medical Workers, a Flu Shot Or Possible Job Loss
theodp writes "Want to work at Winthrop Hospital? Roll up your sleeve, and we'll talk. TIME reports that every employee at the Long Island hospital — from doctors and nurses who care for patients to the administrative, housekeeping and food-service personnel — must be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu or face termination. The mandate comes from the health department of New York, the first state to require all health-care workers to be vaccinated against influenza. Meanwhile, two-thirds of parents say they'll avoid flu shots for their little ones like, well, the flu. So who should you believe — Dr. Bill Frist or 'Dr.' Bill Maher? Before you decide, perhaps a consultation with Dr. Google is in order."
The makers of vaccines, if the vaccine makes you sick? http://www.attorneyatlaw.com/2009/07/dont-even-think-about-suing-if-youre-hurt-by-swine-flu-vaccines/
The force is not with you and you are not a jedi.
First Flu Shot?
I wonder what happens if a worker has an existing health immune system based condition that can be adversely affected by a flu shot?
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
With the degree of hype H1N1 is getting, people are going to be searching all over at the first signs of anything - even if they don't have ANY kind of flu!
So it's a great chart to show you the regions of greatest hypochondria, but little else at this point (in other times I'm sure it's a good indicator).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aggressive vaccinations are a good thing. Think we could have practically wiped out polio or smallpox in this country if we just kicked back and waited to see what happened? Of course the flu isn't the same, and I know it's not going anywhere. But if you think for a second that every healthcare worker shouldn't get the flu shot, you don't know a lot about healthcare. This sort of thing isn't to protect the workers, it's to protect the immunocompromised people in the hospital. They need our healthy immune systems to protect them, too.
The summary is a little sensationalistic. It says 2/3 of parents are avoiding 'flu shots, whereas the article quotes 22% as the figure, with the remainder saying they would definitely vaccinate, or that they would try to vaccinate.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
But I will accept the common wisdom that you can vaccinate against flu, this added to the for me credible reports this flu is nastier than usual I understand the rule given by this hospital.
Because when this breaks out in earnest they'll need all their personnel and some.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I am no medical expert but I am pretty sure we can't "cure" the flu... Doesn't the thing constantly mutate making a "polio-like" vaccine impossible?
Slashdot is too nerdy for me.
Let's see; people who have a very good chance of coming into direct contact with those infected with H1N1 flu on a daily basis and then subsequently coming into contact with others who may be in high-risk groups for said virus being required to get vaccinated against it? Madness, I say. This is what happens when you let government have control over health care. Socialism. Communists. Sky...falling etc.
Now termination may be a bit harsh, but removal from front-line duties for those who refuse the vaccination seems more than reasonable to me. H1N1 may not be the epic disaster that was predicted, but that doesn't mean we should just ignore it entirely.
Absolutely not true. Try some prevention for a change. Get people to wash their hands, stop picking their nose, and stay at home when they're sick. Don't share mice, keyboards, phones. Stop with the "pair programming" where you're breathing down each others' backs. The flu shot is a crap-shoot in terms of effectiveness, and stats show that this latest virus is no more fatal than the average.
For example, of the 151 cases in Mexico when it first started, upon re-examination, only 6 were swine flu.
This tendancy to report ANYTHING as "possibly H1N1 - PANIC!!!" is stupid. I've never had a flu shot, and never will. And if you've had one, keep away from me - you're more, not less, likely to have a compromised immune system in the long run if you get annual flu shots.
Maybe my tin foil hat isn't adjusted right, but of all the vaccines out there, the flu shot (or mist as most people get it these days) is about as safest of them all. Incredibly low side effect rate, very effective, and a guarantee that you're going to get a mild version of the flu before everybody else does. Plus, if you are working in a medical care facility, you won't be an oxygen-burning flu contamination source, making it possible to keep the spread of these viruses down to a minimum.
Yes, the Swine Vaccine in the 70's was very poorly executed and there were many problems. But holy cow folks, it's been over 30 years and medicine has come just a short distance since. For the last 18 years getting a flu shot has been a federally mandated condition of my employment and I don't even work in a health care related field--what the heck is the big deal with getting a flu shot?
Starting next week, all passwords will be entered in morse code.
remind me again, what are your medical qualifications?
Maher's a funny guy, and I like a lot of what he stands for. However, his stances on things like medicine and nutrition are total whack-job, and that's putting it kindly. I saw the Maher interview with Frist the other night. All I can say is that if even one person is influenced to NOT take the H1N1 vaccine based on Bill's foolish, uninformed, hippie opinion on the matter, and subsequently that person gets infected and dies, then IMO Bill is culpable. All available data strongly supports the safety and effectiveness of vaccination. Not vaccinating based on superstition is grossly irresponsible.
Ise presfer Jim beeem meself!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
This isn't new; if anything, mandatory vaccination laws have become much more lenient in the United States than they used to be. In the early 20th century, 11 states had fully mandatory vaccination laws, not just "must get vaccinated as a condition of attending public schools" or "must be vaccinated as a condition of working in certain occupations" sorts of things. Rather, it was a requirement for living in the jurisdiction that you must be vaccinated. Massachusetts's mandatory smallpox vaccination law was upheld by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1905, which is still the main precedent on the subject.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If you listen really carefully that noise you hear is a 1000 lawyers licking their lips.
Cruise TT
If the influenza pandemic will kill off Extreme Programming, now that's something I can get behind.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Have you stopped killing hookers yet?
I know I would feel safer reading Slashdot knowing its employees were properly vaccinated.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I only know Maher from youtube clips, he is a smart and funny guy but every now and then he demonstrates he hasn't quite got the hang of the critical thinking thing and comes out with "alternative" health advise that makes me groan. I once heard him repeat the 1990's greenpeace meme that putting clorine in the water to kill bugs was a BadThing(TM), never mind that it is probably the single biggest public health improvement of the 20th century in terms of lives saved.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"then IMO Bill is culpable"
Why? If someone is stupid enough to take medical advice from a comedian/political satirist then any negative outcome of that is just natural selection. It's not like he's pretending to be a licensed doctor.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
On construction sites: hard hat, steel-toed boots, and when appropriate, gloves and safety glasses
At hospitals and other health-care facilities: immunization for the kinds of diseases that are likely to come through the door, especially those with the potential for arrival en masse.
Of course it is within your rights to refuse. But no safety equipment? No, you aren't allowed on-site in the areas where the relevant hazards exist. If that precludes you working, tough.
Seems reasonable to me. It's still a choice, even if it is a harsh one. But anyone who chose to work in health care should have realized years ago what might sometimes be necessary to do the job.
I'm not a doctor so could you please explain to me how kickstarting my immune system against a specific strain of disease will compromise my immune system? I'd understand if a vaccine was designed to fight off the disease on their own but they're not. They prime your own immune system to start building up the immunities on its own. At least, that's kinda how my doctor explained them to me. Maybe my doctor doesn't know as much about vaccines as you do.
Don't share mice
But they are so cute and cuddly in my han OUCH DAMN THING JUST BIT ME!
---
In other news, Doctors in Raleigh, North Carolina have just found the first case of rodent flu! Stay tuned to learn more!
Nothing wrong with hand washing. But... it sounds like you're a germ-o-phobic dumbass. Where's you're evidence that flu shots compromise your immune system? Links to the weekly world news don't count.
Follow the money => http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1400169&cid=29706953
It's been too cold and rainy to go out at night lately.
You're absolutely right about prevention being key, and handwashing is an extremely neglected, important way to fight disease (disclaimer: of _course_ i am not any kind of doctor).
But there's nothing wrong with getting a flu shot, and it can only improve matters in the vast majority of situations. There may be circumstances where getting a shot would be unhealthy, sure.
Forcing people to get one seems like it causes other, ethical, problems, though, which I didn't mention in my post which is now modded flamebait :)
But you think people should pay attention to Bill Frist, noted video diagnostic specialist and cat torturer, the guy who thought it would be OK to interfere with the Terry Shiavo case without 1) examining the patient or 2) even being a neurologist? In my view anybody who listens to either of these idiots on matters of medicine is a fool.
Your not paranoid man. They really are out to get you!
You know, THEM. Thats right, THOSE PEOPLE.
And dude, that book does not say what that web page claims it says. Don't be suckered by irresponsible conservative politicians using conspiracy theories to stir up the whackjobs against public health.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Sociopaths could keep their jobs by falsifying their vaccination records and spreading the flu to all of the people that are supposedly protected by the shots. This is always a possibility if jobs are threatened. With tens of millions of vaccines, seems like an awful lot to accurately keep track of, especially without a health plan...perhaps we should combine the effort with the US Census as well as stimulus to the unemployed. That should be extra fun.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that when the H1N1 flu vaccine is ready, the first people to get it should be children and young adults between age 6 months and 24 years. That strategy is expected to result in 59 million swine flu cases, 139,000 deaths and cost $67 billion. But there is a better way, according to researchers from Yale and Clemson universities. Flushot If vaccine doses were first distributed to children between age 5 and 19 and to adults age 30 to 39, there would be 15 million fewer infections and 31,000 fewer deaths, write mathematician Jan Medlock and epidemiologist Alison Galvani in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Their strategy would also save $14 billion, they calculate.
I believe the reasoning may go something like this: the vaccine (if I understand everything correctly) contains a dead or crippled version of the disease in question, perhaps even deactivated toxins. The body will have its typical reaction to the disease itself, and will attack the (mostly) harmless vaccine, with the purpose being to cause the immune system to recognize the vaccine as foreign, destroy it, and remember how to destroy it.
I suspect that the GP resists this, perhaps assuming that a more natural exposure to e.g. the flu will result in a better immune system, as it will have to do all the fighting on its own against a real opponent, not a crippled on.
SSC
I'm a healthy skeptic. In both senses of the word. Never had a flu shot, because I don't buy into the hype - I do my research when something doesn't make sense, and this whole H1N1 crap has been exaggerated from the beginning.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
turns out that a lot of the numbers from around the world were similarly inflated. Also, people "coming down with H1N1" isn't the same as people dying from it. Millions die from the flu every year. Why the big panic for a flu that is no worse than average? Money!!!
Get people panicking, and you can profit from it. Ask DHS, Blackwater, etc.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
The insert on FluMist, which is being given to all healthcare workers states:
FluMist® recipients should avoid close contact with immunocompromised individuals for at least 21 days.
Why would it say that? Since it is not a killed virus, it can stay in the nasal passage for 3 weeks and easily shed and infect others. Health care workers spend a lot of their time with people who have compromised immune systems. I thought the point of vaccination was to not spread it, yet they'll be doing that by using this vaccine. Many hospitals around the country have recognized this and won't be giving FluMist to their workers.
Not only that, but it is completely pointless to vaccinate now. Most predict the flu season to peak soon, much earlier than normal. It takes close to a month for a vaccine to give you immunity. During that time you can easily catch and spread the flu.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
What do medical qualifications have to do with the fact that the seasonal flu vaccine is produced according to a prediction about epitopes that may or may not be present on the newly mutated form of the virus? A flu shot does not mean you won't get the flu, it means your body will react to certain antigens it encounters due to previous exposure. That's no guarantee that the flu virus will mutate as predicted. These predictions are made a year in advance. Try predicting the weather a year in advance, maybe no one would get rained on?
How did the GP get +5 informative?
Sure an ounce prevention is worth a pound of cure but the GP does not seem to recognise vaccines as prevention. My guess is the GP is a fit and arrogant man who is way too young to remeber polio or smallpox. I'm sure he will change his opinions after he wakes up one morning and experiences his first bout of pneumonia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And if you've had one, keep away from me - you're more, not less, likely to have a compromised immune system in the long run if you get annual flu shots.
May you please provide some evidence for this claim? If you are talking about antigenic sin, that only applies if you get the shot regularly, but then skip a year:
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392095
The flu shot is a crap-shoot in terms of effectiveness
From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113154000,
"If you are vaccinated with the injected vaccine, you have about a 70 percent chance of preventing influenza."
70% is a crap-shoot? Really?
latest virus is no more fatal than the average
About 36,000 a year die on average from the flu each year.
Anyway, the flu shot isn't a "crap-shoot" and an immune system destroyer as you claim... it is exactly the opposite, actually.
What politicians? There are no politicians involved. I just want John Holdren fired because he's not worthy of being in a non-totalitarian government. If he were fired, it would be a sign that the Obama government isn't irredeemably despotic.
The book clearly does say what that web site quotes it as saying.
That sounds like awful reasoning. Getting a flu shot doesn't prevent you from also getting natural exposure to the flu.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
So you're planning on living in a bubble? No? Living in your casino's hotel room with Kleenex boxes on your feet? No? then just how do you plan on avoiding the flu?
In an ideal world your advice would work, but we don't live in an ideal world. People forget to wash their hands, or don't do it properly. They pick their noses cause it's fun. They'll paw your keyboard and mice because they just want to check their facebook and don't feel like tromping five feet to their own machine.
Stop pair programming? Huh, yeah sure you're PHB isn't going to tell you to man up and get on with it, is he now? Some magazine told him that it would increase productivity. If it's the choice between your sniffles and productivity, well you're gonna be sneezing a lot.
Keep sick people at home. That's a fantastic idea. You absolutely have my 150% unqualified support. Unfortunately sick people are still going to show up for work. It could be because they don't get sick leave. Or they don't think their flu is that bad. Or they've blown all their sick leave on guild raids. Or they're suffering under some messed up Calvinist work ethic that would drag their corpse into work if they could figure out some way of getting their dead limbs to work.
As for the rest of your anti-vac rant; where's your f@$#ing evidence? I'm sick of anti-vac propaganda that pulls suspicions and hysteria from its' arse and expects me to swallow it without thinking.
I'll be sticking to my annual flu shots thank you very much. And you can keep your vunerable immune system in your damn biohazard suit.
I notice you got modded troll, but in fact you're right. Big Pharma and the insurance industry dictate terms and standards of care to doctors. People are too stupid/brainwashed to see it, and then they get angry when someone points out the truth. So in effect most people are actually self-righteous about their ignorance. Graduating from medical school in the U.S. primarily just qualifies a person to be a good salesman for Big Pharma.
A place where sick people kind of _have_ to hang around, many with immune systems that are depressed by illness or suppressed by medications. Decreasing the likelihood that staff, who are there most of the week, will transmit virulent illnesses to at-risk patients is a good thing.
Invenio via vel creo
Read what you wrote - "They prime your own immune system to start building up the immunities on its own." Unfortunately, antibodies aren't all that discrete. For example, the same antibody reaction that's been implicated in type one (juvenile) diabetes, where cows milk ends up leaking into the infants' bloodstream and provoking an antibody reaction; later on in life, the same antibodies start destroying the isles of langrahen; once enough are gone, no more insulin production.
Repeatedly injecting foreign substances to provoke immune responses has also been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases later in life.
And no, doctors aren't necessarily up on the latest and greatest. Look how many decades they told people with peptic ulcers to see a shrink to learn to handle stress. The flat-out refused to believe that ulcers were caused by an infection. Ditto with certain forms of cancer and viruses. Heck, they thought they could "cure" gays and lesbians for over a century. Some even wanted to "cure" the "disease" of being left-handed up until a decade ago.
Even now, some doctors are saying thatyou should pick your nose and eat it, despite the fact that the boogers are there FOR YOUR PROTECTION, and picking your nose short-circuits that process, damages tissue (allowing direct access to the blood stream), and helps spread contaminants (stop wiping your snot all over the place - it's like a culture medium for bacteria).
In other words, doctors can also fall victim to simplistic logical fallacies. Or are you going to start picking your nose and chewing it because some doctor mistakenly thinks it's the right thing to do?
I suppose all this goes to show is that you can torture cats and still have the correct stance on vaccination. I'm not pro-Frist by any stretch. I'm pro-vaccination.
That was essentially Maher's ploy.
By interviewing Frist, a former Senator who was the Senate Republican leader during part of his time in office, instead of some other well-known physician, Maher interposed wholly unrelated politics into the discussion about whether or not to get an H1N1 vaccination. The end result is to convince some people who disagree with Frist on other issues to accept what is essentially a "reductio ad Hitlerum" argument: that if Bill Frist believes you should get a flu shot, then clearly, that's reason enough not to.
that is just natural selection.
True enough on the natural selection point. However, if there's a Tsunami heading to town and someone on the radio sarcastically suggests that today is a good day to surf, there's still an element of responsibility. Contributing to the death of stupid people is funny in theory, but tragic in practice.
43,903,230 people thought enough of Ronald Regan the entertainer to vote him as president. He did such a good job that 11 million more people voted for him the second time around. 54% of California voters chose Schwarzenegger as governor. A majority of voters also elected Sonny Bono to the US House.
Just to show that it isn't just limited to California Republicans drinking the tainted Kool Aid, might I point out Representative Al Franken...
Point being made is that just because you're an entertainer, it doesn't mean you're a bumbling idiot that is completely untrustworthy. Anyone can read the same reports that doctors do in the newspaper about the rates of infection of swine flu versus more traditional influenza strains. After all, even after medical school, doctors have to get their updates from somewhere. Luckily, that somewhere isn't just limited to doctors.
There's 300 million people in the US. The government orderd 600 million vaccines at $20 a pop.
Great! Let's live in a country where speaking your mind can get you sued and or incarcerated. Way to land of the Free.
You're reading way too much into the word 'culpable'. I'm strictly speaking of personal accountability.
Didn't the government award contracts to the makers of the swine flu virus worth billions? How is there a low profit margin?
You're not giving me enough information to agree with you. Billions doesn't sound like much when you're trying to develop a vaccine on short order for tens or hundreds of millions of people.
Oh noes, the troll mods are all over this discussion... just repeating this because it's true:
Case. Fucking. Closed.
On our volunteer fire department. Particularly the EMS people. We see a lot of people with chronic respiratory diseases, COPD, and the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. The flu could kill them. Since they spend most of their time shut in, first responders are a possible vector.
So, yeah, we're getting flu shots and so are the ambulance and hospital people. If you're in the military, they vaccinate you against shit I've never even heard of.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Most of those don't actually sound half as bad as a good case of the flu. And you hand out enough doses over enough time and there will be a few weird associations that pop up by chance. One question: "cancer virus cell base = your H1N1 Vaccine" -- What the fuck are you talking about?
There is NOTHING more idiotic than an anonymous coward making an ad-hominem argument because they can't make an actual one.
cancer virus cell base = your H1N1 Vaccine
And once again you're incoherent. Go away and die.
Cancer in vaccine http://rabbitholenews.blogspot.com/2008/05/merck-admits-cancer-virus-in-vaccines.html
And to I honestly don't think you thought about what you just posted. How is being paralyzed, and brain damage better than the flu?
In other words, while I agree with some vaccines, I don't agree with flu vaccines. The virus mutates too quickly, and we'd be better of practicing proper hygene to limit its' spread. Wash you hands, stop picking your nose, don't share cups, plates, utensils, mice, keyboards, phones, teach people not to rub their eyes with their hands (great way to get that bug you picked up off a door handle into your body), don't allow people to come into work or school sick ("but I don't want to waste a sick day being sick whaaa!!!"), get plenty of fresh air, good food, and exercise, make sure that work places and bedrooms are well ventilated, and stay away from smokers.
It's just common sense - but too often, we just want a pill because it's less work.
I heard the same thing from an employee at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, FL
They're using their grammar skills there.
No, nice fallacious attack though. I think he's say instead of listening to a comedian you should listen to a doctor or a head of medicine. Or hell listen to the data.
[citation needed]
Give me a good peer reviewed study that says flu shots are bad.
Mod parent up, its totally true. the fact that it is at -1 is an insult to /. to have something so clearly modded "-1 disagree, i'm ignorant"
I know it's your god given right to wear a tinfoil hat and shun modern medicine but please keep out of the way while the rest of us excersise our right to be duped into involontary sterilization.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Well... if you get the Chicken Pox for real, you get it once and (typically) are done with it forever. But the Chicken Pox shot, don't you have to get twice in your life to get the same results?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
Clearly you didn't read the bitch. http://www.liveleak.com/e/327_1195303011
next thing you know, they'll be forcing construction workers to wear hard hat and astronauts to wear space suits. It's a slippery slope people!
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I agree however I have read (this does't make it true) that the testing was abbrevieated.
That said, I got my shot.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
and see how things play out when the vaccine has been out for a bit. My wife's opinion too - she's also a physician. They're worried the vaccine was rushed and there could be potential problems. So we are waiting, and really hoping our daughter doesn't get that flu.
46 & 2
Bill Frist was a heart surgeon who later became a Republican Senator. He turned out to have sold his medical beliefs for political gain. During the Teri Schiavo controversy, Frist watched some videotape, then offered his medical belief as a doctor that Teri had brain function. After Schiavo died, an autopsy revealed that her brain had shrunk to the size of a fist, and that there was no chance for higher brain function.
In other words, Frist was dead wrong. But it wasn't because he was stupid. He was blinded by his politics.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I got all those side effects just from reading your idiotic post!
From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113154000,
"If you are vaccinated with the injected vaccine, you have about a 70 percent chance of preventing influenza."
70% is a crap-shoot? Really?
Because the media would never misquote numbers right? http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaccineeffect.htm First, the flu shot will not completely prevent getting the flu. It most cases having had the right flu vacine to match the strain you are infected with will reduce the severity and duration That 30-70% figure the figure for how many people will experience reduced symptoms. This is still completely ignoring the fact that your odds of getting the right vacinne to match your particular strain are very low.
cancer virus
Virus - meaning of "agent that causes infectious disease"
Cancer is not infectious, ergo cancer is not a virus
This just in, tin foil hats cause the following:
* Stupid inane comments
* Uninformed decisions
* Leaping to conclusions
* Paranoia
* Annoia
* Repetitive posting in the hope that it won't be marked as a troll eventually
* Trolling
* A sub 50 IQ
* The inability to reason
You do realise that the source that you have cited is a website called "Fluscam" right? When making a reasoned and informed decision on anything you must, I repeat MUST, consult an unbiased source. Visiting "fluscam" for any information regarding influenza vaccines would be akin to asking a creationist how old the world is - you are not going to get an informed, intelligent answer.
I am not stubborn. I am right!
A 70% chance of preventing influenza is worse than my current odds - which are well above 98% historically (only had the flu once on over half a century, and never had a flu shot in my life).
I'll stick with what works. as apposed to an almost 1 in 3 chance of getting it if I *do* get a flu shot.
But speaking of vaccines - the latest polio outbreak in Africa was CAUSED by the polio vaccine:
So, I won't be bothering to infect myself with the flu.
Those of us that work in IT, and never got to the hospitals proper (my guys work in an office building away from the hospital and patient care areas), arer still required to take the seasonal flu. H1N1, is actually not required as of yet (there are several nurses unions fighting it). The reason we are required, is that in no way can you predict who will be in contact with patients.. for example half of my guys never leave the building.. several (including me) have to have meetings sometimes on the hospital campus... if I get exposed, then I, in turn expose my guys... Bottom line - I hate the flu shot... never took it until this year when it was made mandatory, and frankly the only reason I did that is I like my job. Tose in Healthcare that do not want to take the vac, are free to leave, and I think they should...
I guess all I'm really saying is that in the debate about vaccination -- and I don't even think there's enough evidence to support a reasonable anti-vaccination position -- a discussion between Bill Maher and Bill Frist adds nothing. You might as well have Cheech and Chong talking about it.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA. With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
As for your scary-sounding list, yes, it's a list of possible adverse effects that a person may experience - but it is not an indication of likelihood. No medication is without risk, but in general, people take the medication because the benefits outweigh the risks by a significant margin.
To put it in a grossly exaggerated, probably flawed slashdot-style analogy, the documented possible side effects of flying in a plane are motion sickness, legionnaire's disease, food poisoning, lice infestation, mental anguish, deep vein thrombosis, alcohol abuse, insomnia, halitosis, delayed departure, poverty, or becoming part of a suicide mission that turns your plane into a bomb. But more likely than any of those you'll get to your destination with very little lasting impact on your personal health or safety - as long as you remember that stupid 4-1-1 rule.
Why would I, when you yourself supplied it:
So if I'm "repeating a lie", why are you repeating it, too? ^^
Why would I, when I never said it's the vaccines making the big chunks of money?
As a totally random example, I just recently saw an ad for Sagrotan, saying "kills 99.9% of all bacteria and the H1N1 virus"...
Is there any truth to the rumor that you like to be pissed on by large, hairy men?
The problem is that people respond to public figures as authorities. Completley out of their field. So you have comedians giving medical advice and pastors giving biology lessons. The problem is that people take their authoritative position into account when assigning credibility.
So Bill Maher comes off as a reliable expert on everything because he is on TV. Period. Don't blame me, it is the way "people" are wired.
The end result is that if you have a public platform, people are going to listen. When the listen to stupid advice because you are some sort of public figure, I agree there should be some responsibility on the part of the public figure. They should know better. If they don't, they shouldn't be offering advice - note, not an opinion, real advice. I guess they would only be 50% responsible for stupid advice.
Be my guest.
I'd probably get the flu shot if I thought I had a good chance at getting the flu. Risks from the shot are low and I have gotten the shots the last 5 years or so. It doesn't change Holdren's past though. Why do we have guys like that in our government? It's a really bad sign.
I haven't heard any defense of Holdren, BTW.
Some cancers are transmitted by viruses. Feline leukemia for instance. And HPV raises the chance of many types of cancers.
The rest of your post is spot on though.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I work at a health care facility in Wisconsin and it's either get the vaccine or leave. While I don't have any objections to getting the vaccine myself, with all the whining about shortages of the vaccine I hear every day I wonder why I get the vaccine instead of people at a higher risk of getting the flu. I think society in general would benefit more from the vaccine going to people more at risk to getting the flu--children, the elderly and the immune compromised. As a healthy adult I would prefer to take my chances and be inconvenienced for a few days at worst than have someone who is immune-compromised die of the flu because there was not enough vaccine to go around.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Lots of people now understand that touching your face in general is a very common way to get infected. So cleaning your hands is now fairly common. Thank goodness.
What I would like to see is a legal rite to b#$ch slap those dumb a$$es that sneeze and cough right into my face and think nothing of it. Common courtesy people, cover your bloody mouth and turn away. At least apologize if you can't do it in time. No amount of hand washing is going to stop me catching something if the infection vector is some inconsiderate moron coughing in my face.
Why is H1N1 a big deal? Since you're here at Slashdot, you probably have some computer background, so I suggest you read this. Money quote:
Some of these mutations make no difference; others render the virus harmless; and quite possibly, some render the virus much more dangerous. Since viruses are replicated and distributed in astronomical quantities, the chance that this little hack could end up occurring naturally is in fact quite high. This is part of the reason, I think, why the health officials are so worried about H1N1: we have no resistance to it, and even though it’s not quite so deadly today, it’s probably just a couple mutations away from being a much bigger health problem.
It's good to be a skeptic, but when you're too "skeptical" to accept what experts tell you (oh, wait, you're a biologist specializing in human disease?), you're willfully ignoring the obvious.
And if you've had one, keep away from me - you're more, not less, likely to have a compromised immune system in the long run if you get annual flu shots.
Ahhh ... so you're the one who took George Carlin seriously ... you please get away from me, after swimming in the Hudson. Sheesh.
Just so you know, and not really related to 'swine flu'.
I recently noticed how much more encumbered my years are now that I don't get regular flu shots. As a part of my work in the past, I got flu shots yearly and seemingly never got the flu. I never noticed how 'good' I had it until the last 4 years where I've been a student and haven't gotten the shot.... And so now I spend at least one, if not 2, weeks out of the year suffering.
It took me 4 years to realize how good I had it back then and to take note that I might benefit happily and greatly from a $16 flu shot.
"A flu shot does not mean you won't get the flu [it is based on] predictions are made a year in advance"
Yeah, but they usually work. Have you ever had a flu? I'd rather a prick on the arm and a bit of nausea for a day, even if it wasn't 100% likely to stop the flu.
I'll agree that the swine flu is bad, but not catastrophic (it might mutate into something really deadly over the next 5 years, just like the Spanish one but the vaccine will be useless), and that big pharma will do anything for a buck, but it's still worth getting vaccinated.
If you didn't question medical advice, you would be a drugged out wreck of a human.
Extreme Programming has it's uses, especially when the job is "just implementation".
1 person is more creative than 2, but that's often a disadvantage. Corporate in-house stuff needs drones, and XP is good for dumbing good programmers down just enough that they don't hang themselves on their own ropes.
I have to have a tetanus shot and have First Aid, CPR, AED certs. Those are a condition of my employment. No shots, no certs, no paycheck.
I also have to wear steel toe boots, a hardhat, and a dayglo safety vest if I'm on a job site.
Let's face it, if you work in a high-risk area, your employer would be negligent in *not* requiring you to take reasonable and practical precautions.
If you don't like, the door swings both ways.
health is wealth and prevention is better than than cure! http://www.craigspr.org/
Ashland, Oregon, is a small town full of nutjobs near where I live. It's a college town, and I recently read that nearly 30% of the town has taken the religious exemption from vaccinating their kids. (Trust me, it's not because they're fundamentalist christians. It's because they're crystal-licking new age whacks. Probably a very high average level of education, just not sanity.)
30%. That's crazy, and kids will end up dying from whooping cough because of it. I have a libertarian worldview, and don't like the idea of the government mandating vaccinations. But on the other hand, when people are skipping frigging POLIO shots because of their DEMONSTRABLY WRONG beliefs, they are putting entire communities at risk. I'm torn. Now, about the H1N1 vaccine, I'm not; it should be voluntary, and I'm voluntarily not getting it, nor are my kids. The risk is overblown, and getting the disease would only be a mild inconvenience, same as any flu.
Yeah, but they usually work. Have you ever had a flu? I'd rather a prick on the arm and a bit of nausea for a day and spend 30 dollars, even if it wasn't 100% likely to stop the flu.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Personally, I'd take the shot if it was required by my employer. But it doesn't seem like people really would have to choose between losing their job and getting the shot. If they claim they're allergic to eggs, I highly doubt they would test for that. People allergic to chicken eggs aren't given flu shots.
Well, how about some data from the Australian Government? They're not renowned for inflating the numbers of people affected by a disease.
- 1 in 199.something (ok, call it 200) people who have been confirmed to have the swine flu have died from it.
- 1 in 7.64 people confirmed to have swine flu has been sick enough to require hospital treatment.
I dug this up while I was responding to a post on a forum, where a guy posted a link to an anti-vaccine video, which was referring to the 1976 swine flu vaccine in the US. In that case, 25 people died as complications from the vaccine, and about 500 more got Guillain-Barré syndrome.
But considering they vaccinated slightly north of 48 million people for swine flu in 1976 (48,161,019 according to Wikipedia), that's a death rate of 1 in 1,926,440, and a serious-side-effect rate of 1 in 90,528.
I'll take those odds over swine flu's 1-in-200 lethality rate any day! (Or even 1 in 500 if you assume for every confirmed case there are two or three who get a mild version and don't get tested)
To make it perfectly clear: For every person who died from the 1976 swine flu vaccine, it's possible that nearly ten thousand would have died from the swine flu itself, if not for the vaccine.
That's just deaths. Ignoring non-fatal complications, like having to have both of your feet amputated (and that was an otherwise healthy young person - you know, like you're claiming to be).
Now, I understand that modern influenza vaccines don't have anywhere near the rate of serious side effects as that 1976 swine flu vaccine. You'd think we'd hear about it if they did, considering there are literally hundreds of millions of doses given each and every year. But even if they did, they would still be saving tens of thousands of lives.
Another consideration - most of the people who have died from swine flu in Australia have died despite the best care modern medicine can provide. Some of the people who survived only did so thanks to lung machines, because their lungs are so filled with fluid that they can't breathe, at all.
That's with less than 1 in 600 of the general population getting the disease. What happens if as little as 10% of the population of Australia comes down with swine flu?
Well, then, we could expect to see something like 2.2 million cases, which means 290,000 people would get sick enough to require hospital treatment. In a country that only has a total of 80,000 hospital beds.
I'll let you do the math, but I suspect that 1-in-200 death rate might climb a little, and instead of 10,000 dead, we might see several times that. If it was really virulent and infected a quarter, or half, or even the whole population? Then it's 1918 all over again. There just aint that many anti-virals around, and there definitely aren't enough hospital beds.
And that's why our governments are so damn keen on getting us vaccinated.
Ok, you're kind of losing me on that one because Bill Maher is about as far left as you can get.
"All available data strongly supports the safety and effectiveness of vaccination. Not vaccinating based on superstition is grossly irresponsible." Oh so that must be why my cousin's VA doctor was telling him not to get to the H1N1 shot due to the key component of it being the same thing that was inducing "Gulf War Syndrome" (and was subsequently BANNED) in our soldiers. They can keep their damn shot. Less than 4 months ago they said they didn't have the means to test the efficacy of the vaccine, but now it is suddenly ok for mass-distribution....i think not.
-Oz
As I recall, when I worked as a nurse, the facility, and the surrounding area's facilities, wanted us all to get vaccinated. It was right after 9/11. One of the ways you could get out of it was to be pregnant, or trying to get pregnant. My entire facility, and all but three nurses in the hospital, claimed pregnancy or trying.
When my Director of Nursing came up to ask me about the stupid vacc, she just said, "so am I signing you up as pregnant, or trying?"
People born prior to 1957 are, to a large extent, immune. They were exposed to similar live viruses that provoked stronger immune responses than the current H1N1 virus itself causes. That's why we already know, and we're seeing in the stats, that older people who are otherwise healthy aren't so much at risk - they "got theirs" already and don't need a flu shot.
So your "money quote" isn't worth 2 cents. How good can the rest of the article be, if it ignores the known facts wrt age and infection rates? Not good enough to bother reading any further, since they willfully ignore the truth when it doesn't fit their agenda.
Also, since they're doing this WAY too fast, I'd be more worried about vaccine-induced mutations, like the polio now going around in Nigeria that the WHO admits is from a vaccine that mutated.
I've never had a flu vaccine, and never will. I've had the flu once, and that was because I was stupid enough to keep working around people who had it, and did way too many hours and not enough sleep. I won't make that mistake again, but even including that one time, my success rate in avoiding infection is over 98%, without any vaccine, so I'm not in the least worried.
And my kids are doing the same. In fact, I don't know anyone (even people in the health-care field) who are going to get vaccinated. We'll stick to proper hygiene, eating and sleeping properly, and telling people who ARE infected to GTFO.
Originally the panic was due to the very high transmission rate (apparently) and the very high potential mortality rate, from memory it was looking at over 10% - which is a hell of a high mortality rate for anything, flu or otherwise. Then as the panic settled down it became more apparent that H1N1 swine influenza is simply a somewhat more transmissible influenza virus with some interesting sources and non-human mixing vessels.
Doesn't mean you shouldn't vaccinate against it though. Considering that, as you yourself stated, 'millions of people die from the flu every year', why shouldn't we try to prevent the deaths of some of those millions for a strain that seems relatively stable and preventable at the moment?
As for prevention, sure, that's a great idea. In fact, I'm amazed that it's not already official health policy wherever you are living; that medical staff should continually be cleansing their hands before and after any patient care. It sure as hell is here, whenever I go in to see a patient I clean my hands on the way into the room, and on the way out again. Every time. And sometimes in the corridors as well when moving between wards.
I'm also fully vaccinated against almost everything possible, get my flu shots every year, will be getting swine flu in the next week or so. Most of that is mandated by NSW Health. In fact, all of it is. I don't see what the big deal is here for the State of NY finally requiring healthcare professionals to be vaccinated - it should have happened already.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
I don't know where your non-cited figure of "6" deaths from the original swine flu outbreak in Mexico came from, but maybe it was from a misinterpretation of a report detailing the deaths of 7 patients at a single tertiary care hospital in Mexico city during a single month. The New England Journal of Medicine article that detailed the fate of the 98 patients acutely ill with the swine flu in that hospital at that time also references that 85 people in Mexico were known to have died as of May out of 4910 confirmed cases, a fatality rate of 1.7%.
Fortunately only Mexico during the initial outbreak reported such a high fatality rate. This is very fortunate as almost no young person in the world had any kind of immunity to this strain. In all likelihood when you come down with it you will be 'lucky' enough to only have to suffer a few days of bed-bound misery.
I'm a healthy skeptic.
Skepticism is good, but you've jumped way beyond that into conspiracy theories and paranoia.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
Doing nothing does not count as a preventative measure. It is true that usually with the seasonal flu vaccine scientists must guess months beforehand what strains to put in the vaccine and since they don't always guess right the vaccine is usually only about 70% effective, but as for pandemic H1N1 the vaccine is an excellent match and it should give almost everyone who gets it protection.
Well, I know that they don't prescribe medicine.
I have no beef with nurses; in fact, i respect and appreciate their role in the medical profession. But seeing as how they don't prescribe medicine and don't undergo the same training as physicians, the fact that one RN notes that pharmaceutical companies contribute to textbook production is an interesting anecdote and nothing more. It is just as meaningful as my observation that I know a lot of doctors who refuse any sort of drug rep gifts on the grounds that it might influence their decision to prescribe.
What neither anecdote indicates is that there is just as much skepticism within medical colleges to the relationship between funding sources and conclusions as there are outside of the walls; that there are ethics courses focused on the critical analysis of pharmaceutical claims; that, in general, no serious text can get around scientific fact just to present and position their own product. (The faculty, after all, have to approve the referenced texts, and precious few of them desire to be perceived as corporate shills.)
If you look elsewhere in the thread, you'll see quotes from The Lancet wrt auto-immune diseases and vaccines, and to WHO admitting that the polio vaccine in Nigeria mutated and is now causing polio instead of curing it.
But yes, Carlin was one of the great ones :-)
There's an analysis of Bill Maher's anti-medicine stance on the Science-Based Medicine blog. It points out how he's considered an informed "skeptic" due to his anti-religious views, despite him embracing medical quackery.
Well, how about some data from the Australian Government? They're not renowned for inflating the numbers of people affected by a disease. I do not believe that the American anti-vaccine crowd are interested in some imaginary fairy land called Australia where big Pharma does not have its hand in every pocket of medicine. Because that would ruin most of their arguments, and they would need to come up with new ones, too much hard work.
You sir, are not a healthy skeptic, to quote you from another post:
This is woo woo non-science , i.e. you are full of shit, please try better next time you want to pose as a healthy skeptic.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
We just got through the H1N1 flue and regular flue season in Chile. It was bad, but not anything like the way they are hyping it up in the States. People got sick, a few people died, but life went on as normal just fine. The only real thing that set it apart was the age of those that died.
Before the season hit I paid to have all my employees get the normal flue shot. My reasoning was that at least it would lower the confusion if anyone did get sick it might be easier to dignose if there was lower probability that someone was just getting the seasonal flue. The problem we faced when it started here was it was so early in the outbreak around the World that it was not even clear what the symptoms, treatment, or progression was going to be like. It was a good call, because it turned out there was no real way to differentiate it from the normal flue. The Chilean government quit trying to test and quarantine very early on, and just prescribed H1N1 meds to anyone that presented a fever and one other classic symptom. They did not waist resources or time testing everyone. They made tamiflue and related medication widely available to everyone in the country for free with no questions asked.
All told, I know a couple of people that got the flue personally and where formally diagnosed with it. I am almost certain two of my employees did contract it, one got the seasonal flue shot and one did not. Neither got medication for it, and just rode it out like the normal flue.
All and all it was just a bad flue season, and honestly I believe I have lived through much worse when I lived in the Northern Hemisphere. The initial psychological panic around it was more damaging than the bug. Even that passed as everyone realized we where not all going to turn in to zombies and start eating human brains.
The thing that scares me is the boomerang effect next year. That bug is going to go off to places like the U.S., where they health care system is a disaster, it will go through the super bug wash of various mixes of over-prescribed antibiotics or populations that can not afford treatment, and then it is going to return next year more of a super bug. I doubt however there is anyone left in south America that has not been exposed to it. The U.S. and much of the Northern hemisphere I do not believe can just provide free medication to everyone. The populations are too big. People are going to hesitate to go to doctors, not buy the medication, and it is going to spread much faster than it did here.
One more piece of layman's medical advice / observation about H1N1. Watch out for handling money. All the banks (and other locations with high cash flows) I went to seemed to be the hardest hit locations (like 30% or more of the staff out or sick), even more than the hospital staff it seemed. As I understand it can live on money for like 12 to 48 hours. Just think of how many hands say your average $1 or $5 bills goes through in a 48 hour period. Stick to using your plastic when possible to pay for things. Petty cash is the fastest way to spread anything.
Living in Chile
According to flucount DOT org which is updated every 4 minutes...
The worldwide number of H1N1 Swine Flu deaths totals 5,149 people as of 11:35PM EST 10-10-09.
The Worldwide population count is 6,789,710,547.
This means that only 1 person dies from Swine Flu out of every 1,318,646 people.
The general consensus in this thread from what I have seen is that they think every 1,318,646 people should get injected with a potentially life threatening vaccine in order to MAYBE protect that 1 person.
Are you shitting me? You won't be giving ME any flu jab.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
From Penn's Center for Bioethics:
http://www.vaccineethics.org/issue_briefs/requirements.php
Today, the term "mandate" is imprecise when applied to immunization. The last time the U.S. required vaccination without exception--a true mandate--was during World War I.1 Today, processes in place in the vast majority of states provide parents with significant latitude regarding whether to vaccinate their children.
Mandatory vaccination programs should be reserved for the most severe of disease outbreaks, and only after the designated State or Federal official has declared a state of emergency.
Your anecdote !> my data
according to my mom, who is an RN and damn good at her job, is that drug company's help fund and write the medical text books schools use.
And I also supposed she told you that you needed to know the secret handshake to see the special MDs that were taught with the secret unbiased text books that were unfunded by the drug companies! I suppose that she also told you that the textbooks she studied out of in Nursing school were published by the same companies that published the textbook for medical schools, One of my instructors was honored by being tasked with writing a question for the state board exams in Nursing, it took her 6 months to do it properly and cross research to prove and disprove each possible answer, imagine a whole textbook. I'm glad your mom is not only an RN but a damn good one, she a rare and dieing breed.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Yes, but if you don't get exposed to Chicken Pox until you're older, or heaven forbid pregnant, it can be very serious to you and your fetus. Given this, it's safer to get the vaccine as a child rather than risk possible serious complications if you're not lucky enough to contract the disease at a young age.
Look through the thread. Read the link I posted (along with quotes) from The Lancet. You know, that peer-reviewed, internationally respected medical journal. The article that talks about specific cases of vaccine-caused auto-immune diseases ...
Then you can apologize.
Then you can read some of the other links I posted in this thread, including to the study that apparently shows that if you had previous flu vaccines, you're twice as likely to catch H1N1. And the WHO admitting that polio in Nigeria is now being caused by a mutated polio vaccine.
And other references to how most people born prior to 1957 already have better immunity than the vaccine confers - which explains why older people in good health don't need to fear H1N1.
Vaccines don't always work as intended, they can have side effects, including causing the very diseases they were supposed to cure (we ignored this from our experience with animals to our regret - for example, the leptospirosis vaccine your vet recommends is the #1 cause of leptospirosis in dogs).
Some vaccines are great - like the smallpox vaccine. A disease with a stable viral structure. An easy target. Flu is not the same, and vaccines, absent other considerations such as basic hygiene and health (like washing your hands, not coughing on other people, eating properly) is not going to be the cure-all you seem to think it will be.
This simply means that you willfully misunderstand statistics. A vaccine that saves millions of lives at the risk of a few hundred is a justifiable risk. The same logic applies to warfare: we sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. It is painful and regrettable, but it must be done.
That is a FAR cry from saying that vaccines "cause disease" or that this is a manufactured pandemic to make money.
At least 62% of the U.S. population is under the age of 45. How does conferred immunity from the 1957 asian flu help them? What about the world?
You may have only gotten the flu once. The plural of anecdote is not data. Epidemiology is data, and it argues against you.
If your car never fails in the 10 years that you drive it, does it mean that mechanics are perpetrating fraud? Think about it.
...on this issue, he is a nutbar. How can he decry people who ignore all the scientific evidence of evolution or global warming, yet do the same thing himself on this issue?
for MOST people that don't work in health care or around sick people, the flu shot is wasted on them. The resources required to vaccinate that many people are better spent other places versus fight what for the vast majority of people is a nuisance. In the past "qualified medial personnel" have specifically told healthy children and adults that the flu shots were resource intensive and getting the flu wasn't bad for normal healthy people. I've said before, I'm 36 and always been told the flu shot "wasn't for me"... why the fuss now?
The question is what's changed now? Personally, I think the issue is entirely political. The last year of Bush's presidency was a clusterfuck and there was big media noise that enough "old people" weren't going to get their shots... then of course there was a run on doctor offices for said shots... creating panic where there was a minor problem. I'm sure it was on the agenda for the "new powers" to fix that problem from last year and the media is right there gobbling up the hype they created last year. I don't see the big push because the vaccine for the dangerous stuff like Swine Flu isn't available to the general public or even outside medically necessary groups yet.. meaning all those people pushed thru line have to do it all over again! That's a colossal waste of resources.
He didn't say listen to Frist he said don't listen to Maher. I take it you never learned the difference between iff and if statements or logic gates.
Clearly, you weren't aware that people who die from influenza usually have other contributing factors. If those people feel vaccination may help them, have at it. But to force a completely healthy individual to risk various reactions up to and including death is not acceptable when dealing with a disease of this little effect. 30,000 people (I will pretend you are right, instead of acting the wiki-fascist, as you do) is a small percentage of the people who actually contract the flu or become carriers without exhibiting traditional symptoms.
Clearly, you need to use a buzzer function again to impress everyone with your childish antics.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
"The biggest stories in the media are the number of CHILDREN who have succumb to the virus. So in reality all school aged children all the way up through graduate school should be the population receiving mandatory vaccinations."
-Did you ever stop to think that stories about children will get FAR MORE attention than stories about the 90 year old senior citizen?
"Previous rate of hospital acquired flu infection are so low that they often fly under the radar, whereas SCHOOL acquired flu transmission is extremely high. The most common hospital acquired infection is a skin staph infection."
-Did you stop to think WHY the rate is so low? It's low in hospitals because of the PRECAUTIONS that are taken. The rate is higher in schools because the only precautions taken in schools are hand-washing. Do pneumonia patients spend their time outside getting scraped up in the dirt playing kickball? No. If a hospital worker were to get sick, they could still unknowingly transmit the virus to other patients before they realized it.
With your obvious ignorance, and strong "drug-company" conspiracy undertone, I am at a loss on how on Earth you managed to become a "Health Service PROFESSIONAL". I'm guessing you work in the cafeteria.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
It's referred to as "original sin". That is, when presented with a novel antigen, antibodies are formed in response. Then if a similar antigen is presented later it will respond with the marginally effective antibodies against the first antigen rather than producing a maximally effective one tailored to the second antigen.
Do you have a link to the source showing that the US really ordered 600,000 vaccines?
When it comes down to it, being married to a medical technologist, I see this as coming down to staffing. I know in her lab, if two people call in they are buried in work, and if three people call in they are super fucked. Granted, she works nights, and staffing in the day time is somewhat better, but with hospitals making cutbacks due to the economy and the fact that they are about to get bent over and reamed by Obamacare (her hospital has already cut a dozen doctors and a handful of nurses and techs in anticipation of the need to give out more medical care with less money coming in), hospitals are going to do anything they can to try and keep as many people working without getting sick as possible, and this includes immunizations for H1N1.
Unlikely. Look-up "herd immunity". Smallpox was eradicated with less than 70% of the affected populations (in Africa mostly) vaccinated against it.
Still, if it gets much higher, there could be a major outbreak.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Also, it appears that the oft-repeated "36,000 people die from the flu every year" number is also bogus, being a bad extrapolation from a set of people who are already seriously ill, and not numbers taken from actual sampling the population at large. The actual toll may be well under 1,000. So much for any epidemological studies that support big numbers with bad guestimates instead of hard counts.
Anyway, on to your other remarks ...
So even you admit that for at least, say, 30% of the population (I'll let you keep 8% for the chronically ill), the vaccine is not really needed, since they already are immune to swine flu from past exposure? Well, that's a start.
So how about removing the other low-risk groups - those over 5 years, under 6 months, the non-pregnant women? That's the vast majority of the population who simply aren't all that much at risk.
I'll give you the obese, because they ARE at risk, but that can't be more than ... oops, we're talking America ... 67% of the population over 20 are either overweight or obese. Fuck, why are you people even worried about swine flu when you've got a pandemic of excess flab? Okay, let's see - morbidly obese - 3%. I'll give you the fatties. Pick a reasonable number for the number of pregnant women, and the number of kids between 6 months and 5 years old ... both combined, along with the Lardos certainly won't bring you to even 20% of the population. ALL the under-5 is only 7%, and if we take 10% of the people between 20 and 45 and say they're pregnant, that still only yields 3.5%, and we have to remove half of them, because they're men ... which gives us 1.75% of the population who are pregnant (still high, but who cares).
So, between the morbidly obese (3%), the pregnant women (1.75%), and ALL the kids under 5 (7%), you're only at 11.75% of the population. How is giving the other 88.25% of the population a vaccine they don't need going to help the situation? And if the virus mutates, the vaccine is useless anyway. Now, since it's more likely that the vaccine will mutate to a weaker form, as happened in the past, people will crow about "how the vaccine worked", when it did nothing of the sort.
There is NO justification for hyping vaccines to people who aren't at risk. That's 88.25% of the population who are being buffaloed into doing something that only profits the drug companies, as opposed to simpler (but less glamourous) solutions that will also help prevent them from catching other variants of the flu, and colds.
And what about the latest study (look elsewhere in the thread) that shows that if you had a flu shot in the past, you double your chances of catching H1N1? Double! A study with 13 million subjects is not anecdotal - it's far more subjects than the other studies to date, which may explain why we're only making the connection now.
As for the pandemic, it IS bullshit. 7 deaths in more than half a year. Even a death a day would not be a "serious pandemic", and we're nowhere near that.
Have you ever had a flu?
How the hell should I know. Do you normally get blood work done each time you get a fever and body aches?
The word "Flu" gets thrown around to indicate any non-serious respiratory problem common to industrialized nations. The companies who actually make money devising and marketing these serums can claim X% efficacy all they want, but it means nothing to a public who still gets food poisoning and rhinovirus and don't feel as though they have been protected at all because they have no practical way to ever know if they get the genuine, honest to god "Flu" or not.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
This is a much larger, more comprehensive study (13 million people) than most, which is why it may have found a correlation that other studies missed.
Or it could be that the negative effect of the vaccine extends for longer than originally thought. As one othr example, there is similar evidence wrt the MMR vaccine.
And, well, if you're not already a doctor or a trained scientist familiar with the literature, you probably should skip trying to listen to the data and listen to your doctor.
this thing has been over-hyped from the beginning - when the WHO had to reduce the initial dead from 152 to 7. "Serious outbreak?" Bullshit.
Currently, the flu is estimated to cause 1 death in every 200 - same as regular flu - but that number is suspect because of the way it was derived. Unlike other estimates, it ignores people who contracted the flu and recovered w/o seeking treatment, so the actual number is lower than a "regular flu".
Also, 1918 didn't kill 20% of the population. The wiki article that people pull that stat from gives contradictory figures. In one paragraph, it's 10% to 20%. A few paragraphs down, it's 2% to 20%. Totally unreliable.
Now what was going on in 1918? Try a world war. Lots of disease and sickness and death during wartime. Also, people didn't die from the flu in 1918 - they died mostly from bacterial pneumonia - because antibiotics hadn't been discovered.
We won't see any more people die than during a regular flu season. In fact, since everyone who was exposed to the swine flu in 1957 has decent immunity to this flu (which is not swine flu - it's an influenza a variant), we'll probably see fewer deaths, except among the highest-risk - the 3% of the population who are morbidly obese, and are going to die of *something* anyways but would be unscathed if they just didn't eat for 4.
Also, I'm betting that this virus will follow the usual path, and rapidly become LESS virulent. Mathematically, as it mutates, the odds are that the vast majority of those mutations won't be as effective, so while it'll still provoke an immune response which will protect against the original form, it won't kill people off in anywhere near the same numbers. Talk of a pandemic is just hype at this point in time.
Also, if it mutated to something much more virulent, your vaccine wouldn't protect you, since it wouldn't be against the new strain.
Then again, I'm probably immune according to the gov't, so it's no skin off my nose.
The problem is, they followed doctors around, and most who THOUGHT they got it right, were still cross-contaminating from handling charts, etc. You just do things unconsciously, and BANg, there you go!
Now if you were born before the 1957 pandemic, the shot is less effective than the natural immunity you got from your previous exposure. Don't take the shot, don't worry about it, you're safe.
Then again, we can expect some more fun around 2020 as a new flu strain comes out that exploits people who don't have a previous immunity from the Hong Kong flu of 68-69. We'll see the same OMG reaction, made worse because of the further increase in population, but that's life.
This is now the "new normal" for flu, since we travel more. Less travel would mean longer times between outbreaks (a good thing), but much more dead at each outbreak (a bad thing), since we wouldn't have as many people who have either partial or complete immunity to any new variant due to previous exposure to similar variants. There's always a balance.
Think we could have practically wiped out polio or smallpox in this country if we just kicked back and waited to see what happened?
No, but the case for these vaccines was clear since both small pox and polio are incredibly serious diseases resulting in high mortality rates or permanent handicap. For these diseases the rate of serious complications from the vaccine is far, far lower than the rate of serious consequences from the disease so it is very clear that you should vaccinate.
The problem is that we are now developing vaccines for diseases which have far, far lower rates of complications and fatalities. An example is chicken pox. The rate of complications from the vaccine is comparable to the rate of complications from the disease, the WHO recommends it mainly as an economic measure (stops parents missing work to look after sick kids) and since the vaccine wears off you have to have booster shots or risk getting shingles as an adult which is a serious disease.
Swine flu seems to be between the two. The disease can sometimes be serious but the vaccine has had no large scale testing. Hence, since I'm not an "at risk" category I'm waiting this one out at least until a while after the mass vaccination has started to see if there are an complications from the vaccine. Once the guinea pigs have shown it is safe I'll get my shot then.
First off, from a public health point of view it's perfectly reasonable to insist that *all* nurses, MDs, and hospital support staff are vaccinated against most diseases that hospitals are likely to encounter, and against *all* diseases that threaten to become a pandemic (and for which vaccines are available).
The reason is very simple: health-care workers will get into contact with large numbers of weakened patients (old, infirm, very young, diseased, suffering from trauma etc.) and you don't want them to:
- (a) become infected themselves (because they weren't vaccinated) and then infect scores of vulnerable patients because they are carriers
- (b) become unavailable for work due to illness right when they are needed most.
So, by and large and taking one thing with another, we are better off without health-care workers who don't wish to be vaccinated. This simple consideration consideration is enough to warrant *mandatory* vaccination for all health-care workers.
The risk to at-risk individuals (and health-care workers) from the disease itself is much greater than the risk from a vaccine, so (statistically speaking) the only rational course of action is to take the vaccine.
The only thing that I think might be done differently is to dismiss such health-care workers as refuse vaccination. But then again, what do you do with people who can't be kept in their present function?
cancer virus cell base = your H1N1 Vaccine
And once again you're incoherent. Go away and die.
http://www.bild.de/BILD/news/bild-english/world-news/2009/08/07/swine-flu-health-expert-warning/does-virus-vaccine-increase-risk-of-cancer.html
http://vactruth.com/2009/10/02/fda-approved-h1n1-vaccines-contain-ingredients-known-to-cause-cancer-and-death/
A real quick google search would have turned up the information you're looking for. Asshole.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Except it is not millions with this one. It is thought to be 250.000-500.000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic#Historical_context
And that is worldwide. And that is nothing different compared to a 'normal' flu.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
When making a reasoned and informed decision on anything you must, I repeat MUST, consult an unbiased source.
There is no unbiased source available. Our only option is to play multiple differently-biased sources against one another. Remember when Elsevier got caught publishing whole bogus journals for Merck? It happened this year. You can NOT trust the "peer-reviewed" literature unless you personally know the peers reviewing it, and know that they are knowledgeable and trustworthy. I've been lied to and fucked around by medical professionals too many times to just accept that since there's an MD or a PHD on the front of a paper that it must be true.
Show me an "unbiased" source, and I'll show you a reason not to trust them. Seriously! Let's try it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is only partly true (only a very small part) and much less so now.
The drug companies did sponsor some thin "throw-away" quick reference books on narrow topics. With the crackdown on drug companies, this is much less true now.
Drug companies didn't and still don't fund or write any of the major medical reference texts that are used primarily. They would sometimes buy them to give away to doctors (again, this happens much less now), but they didn't have input on the content. I've edited major medical texts, and know the editors of other leading texts, and know that drug company concerns had nothing to do with the content.
"I haven't heard any defense of Holdren, BTW"
In my lifetime the world's population has more than doubled, that fact is currently treated as the "elephant in the room" in any discussions about our species future.
I accept your basic facts, I'm not american and know little of him but WP largely agrees with your link in that Holdren speculated on radical birth control and actively supported SOME of those ideas. However it also states - "He testified to the nomination committee that he does not believe that government should have a role in determining optimal population size [6] and that he has never endorsed forced sterilization."
Without the benifit of actually reading the book it looks to me it's your typical "acedemic investigates doomsday population senarios" type of thing that was fashionable in the 70's and 80's. However to go from there to a vast government sterilization conspiracy taking place via flu shots is a political leap of (bad) faith that I'm not willing to take.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I bet that if some patient catches H1N1 while in the hospital, the lawyers will be _all over_ the fact that the hospital administration negligently did not have the staff vaccinated against it faster than you can say "megabucks in damages".
I find it incredible that in a country such as the US where everyone goes on all the time about their rights, that they can force mandatory vaccination and you do not have the right to choose not to be vaccinated.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
You know, you might get people to take your arguments more seriously, if you didn't write so much like an asshole. Just sayin'.
I did read most of your points, and I do think you may have some points, but your presentation stinks to high heaven. Slagging off large parts of your audience isn't a great way to get people to take you seriously (fat slobs? You think firing around that aspersion here on slashdot is going to win you many allies? As one of the aforementioned fat slobs, I'd be sorely tempted to bloody your nose for you, for that one, if I ever got the chance) .
Your posts make you sound like a crank with an axe to grind, no matter how good your citations are.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
A friend of mine works in the ER of a large NYC hospital. Contrary to the flu trends chart saying this region has "high" flu activity, she says the ER is seeing just a trickle. She also says nearly half the staff she's spoken to -- doctors, nurses -- say they won't be getting the H1N1 shot before the deadline. "They can't fire us all."
Mod Me Up. You'll make a grown man cry.
But surely you've noticed that you give up all your rights when you go to work?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Actually, while RNs can't prescribe drugs, they are authorized to administer a fair number of drugs without direct order while under the direction of a doctor. As are Paramedics. So as a matter of fact, they do have to study drugs in their education.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
I don't think you understand how it works:
No vaccination: person gets chicken pox as a kid is ill for a week, recovers and has immunity for life (unless something else compromises their immune system).
With vaccination: person gets vaccinated as a kid and gets immunity for 10 years (might be as long as 20 now but really they don't know how long the immunity lasts because it has not been around that long). As a teenager parents ensure they get the 10 year booster so immunity continues. Next booster (or first if 20 years) comes due at university. The person is probably completely unaware of it, forgets to have it and is no longer immune to chicken pox. Several years later they are exposed and then get a serious case of shingles.
So which one do YOU think is the way to go? The problem is that with the vaccine being handed out like candy it is hard for kids to get exposed. Our kids will have to get vaccinated if they haven't managed to catch it before ~15 but it would be better for them to be exposed to the disease beforehand.
Maybe you should learn to read before you speak. You cannot point to anywhere in my post where I stated 6.7 billion people got the virus. That is the population of the earth. so if 5,149 people ON THE EARTH have died from swine flu then that's 1 out of every 1.31 million people ON THE EARTH that will die. Since the "authorities" want ALL PEOPLE ON THE EARTH to get the vaccine then the numbers become relevant. Maybe there's a vaccine for xenophobia you can try.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
The point isn't whether the flu vaccine is necessary or not. The point is you are mandated to get it if you work in a NYS article 28 facility (section 205 of the NYS public health law specifically) you are forced to get this shot if you want to keep your job. This includes care agencies, Hospitals, Nursing homes etc...
Is the vaccine safe, who knows? They just started clinical trials. This is the problem Health care workers are being forced into the clinical trial. I know for a fact that it is not FDA approved yet, and because it is a vaccine for a "pandemic" disease it is allowed to bend the rules of acceptable ingredients. The mercury content of the vaccine is higher than normally allowed. available here While a healthy male may have no problem with this, how about a pregnant female? Some of the ingredients are known to worsen thyroid conditions . The problem is no one really knows what will happen.
Also why mandate the swine flu shot but not the regular flu shot. 12% of people die from the flu every year (CDC reports) yet as of June of 2009 the swine flu has about a 6% mortality rate (Again CDC reports).
This disease is less deadly than most other strains of the flu yet there is panic over it. The big deal is while the normal flu may put you out of commission for 3 days the swine flu can knock you out for 6 days to 2 weeks.
The CDC is not mandating health care workers get the shot, only NYS is. Plus you have to sign multiple wavers that you won't sue anyone should you end up sick from it. Basically you are given the choice of playing Russian roulette or lose your job. You have a 1 in 6 chance of getting the bullet but if you get the bullet your chances don't matter you are stuck with the reality. A lot of the people educating people on the Vaccine when asked if they will get it, turn around and say no. How can they truthfully educate people on how safe this vaccine is if they refuse to get it?
I know in Manhattan on Oct 13 an injunction is being filed by PATRICIA FINN on behalf of all health care workers, and it may go class action suit if the injunction is approved.
Fyi I just gave a lecture on swine flu and have a ton more info if any one wants it, most of it is available off CDC websites though.
The Lunatick, Carpe Corpus!
Eugenics used to be fashionable too. Holdren's views are no less dangerous. And, in many ways, they're very similar. Holdren was simply worried about quantity rather than quality.
Having a guy like Holdren in a government position destroys any possibility of trust. If we need to trust our government and be vaccinated to prevent a pandemic, then Holdren should resign. It's the only responsible course of action.
But even without a pandemic, this is the USA. We have a right to a government we can trust. Holdren should be ineligible for government positions of responsibility in a non-totalitarian regime. Maybe someday we can have one of those again.
And what happens if it happens to kill a couple orders of magnitude more than 250,000 to 500,000? Mass immunization is partial insurance against a dangerous mutation in this strain. As I see it, this strain is more likely than usual human-borne flu strains to become something more dangerous.
Also, it appears that the oft-repeated "36,000 people die from the flu every year" number is also bogus, being a bad extrapolation from a set of people who are already seriously ill, and not numbers taken from actual sampling the population at large. The actual toll may be well under 1,000. So much for any epidemological studies that support big numbers with bad guestimates instead of hard counts.
You have a cite? The WSJ article doesn't support your claim. It just shows that the 36,000 per year claim has some large error bars.
And the rest of your post isn't justified. I see no evidence that the death rate from the flu is as low as you claim. And your analysis of susceptible populations is bogus. Maybe a bit over 10% is unusually susceptible to the flu (insulting labels such as "lardos" and "fatties" really further your case here), but the rest can die from a more lethal variation of an existing flu strain. That's the point you seem to be missing here. It can get worse. A flu that rapidly goes through the population as this H1N1 variant does, is more likely than normal flu variants to become unusually lethal. You're likely to be right, but that's merely because you are betting against a low probability event, not because you have an understanding of what's going on.
I hate to break it to you, but you're already eating your snot. Most of it drips down your throat from the back of your nose and gets swallowed.
But most disease requires immunization rates of about 85% to confer herd immunity.
There are well documented cases of small religious communities not vaccinating there kids then having perfectly predictable numbers of kids dying of measles and other preventable disease.
Measles in Wales
Outbreak of measles in Religious communties
Not vaccinating your kids is a terrible decision that puts them at risk of permanent crippling injury and death.
Anarchists never rule
Proved the wrong thing.
You are showing that seasonal vaccines negatively effect the H1N1 virus. Even in your quote it says that the goal of not using the seasonal vaccine is so that you can focus on the H1N1 vaccine. Which is to say the vaccine is a good thing and useful and Lancet supports it.
Yay terrible arguments.
If you're one of the morbidly obese fat slobs that are at higher risk, I'm not worried about anything you might do except you sitting on me.
Morbid obesity is a "lifestyle disease" - completely preventable, and there is NO excuse. And there's a reason why they call it "morbid" obesity - it can kill you.
That 3% of the population in the US is morbidly obese says something grim.
So, if you're one of those morbidly obese fat slobs, clean up your act, stop stuffing your pie-hole, and claiming you're "disabled" (while too many of you sure manage NOT to be disabled when it comes time to belly up to the all-u-can-eat, though). You get that way one mouthful at a time, same as anyone else.
I have no more patience for the morbidly obese than I do for smokers saying "I can't quit". They knew the risks. They thought "I can quit any time!" They were wrong, and after decades of ignoring warnings from everyone+dog, they have ONLY themselves to blame. If they make honest attempts to quit, THEN they have my sympathy - but to say "I can't quit" is bullshit. They don't even try. I agree with doctors who refuse to treat patients who won't quit smoking. Just like I agree with the official policy of refusing heart transplants to smokers, and the morbidly obese. Waste of time and resources, and an exercise in futility.
Same as the morbidly obese who knew every time they looked in the mirror, or when they couldn't see their feet any more, that they were too fat. I mean, how do these people even wipe their asses? Oh wait, many of them don't - which contributes to that "morbidly obese person miasma" that surrounds many of them.
I'll save my sympathy for those who at least TRY to lose the excess weight, and TRY to quit smoking, and TRY to get off crack. If you don't care enough to even try, why should I give a shit. Or, more generally, why should anyone else give a shit when you don't.
If you're trying to lose the weight, you have my sympathies (a waist is a terrible thing to mind :-) If not, not.
before I take any vaccination shots whatsoever. I haven't ever gone and gotten them in the past why should I do so now just
because Novartis and this government want me to?
they blew it when they just came across as too DAMM EAGER TO INJECT... too DAMM EAGER.
The opportunity for a world-wide injection campaign is out the window and wont be back, possibly for a quiet a while, but most likely
not ever as
PEOPLE LIKE YOU AND ME are wising up to the extent of the FRAUD
The bogosity isn't just from the large margin of error - it's also from they fact that there has NEVER been proper statistics done - NEVER been a proper count, so there are no valid statistics. It's guesswork, and always has been. Same as the bogus claim that "spinach is good for you - it has lots of iron" which turned out to be an oft-copied mistake from a single government chart with a misplaced decimal point. Spinach has no more iron than any other veggie, and most of that isn't even bio-available. And yet, people still say "eat your spinach - it's good for you!"
If H1N1 mutates into something else, then your vaccine targeted at H1N1 isn't going to help you very much, is it?
The death rate is lower than the official claim for the simple reason that they counted only people who went to the hospital. Not everyone goes to the hospital just because they think they *might* have the flu. So, since they admit they didn't account for anyone who didn't present at a hospital, the death rate has to be lower than "the official rate", unless people are dying in their homes, which is something we're not seeing. So no, this is a mild strain of flu.
also, the reason it doesn't affect most older people is because if you were around during the 1957 epidemic, unless you have serious underlying health problems, you're probably still immune.
The 3% of the population who are morbidly obese didn't give a shit about themselves while they ate their way to blimpdom, so why should I? "I can't lose weight" is a defeatist attitude. If they're not willing to try, I have no sympathy. If they're making an honest effort, they have my full support, because a waist is a terrible thing to mind. But when you see pictures of people complaining about delays in getting gastric bypass surgery, and they're holding a big gulp in one hand, and a 12" sub in the other, just kindly fuck off and die already, lardo. Stop blaming others for your own problem, and accept some responsibility for your current situation.
Same with smokers who, after being warned for years and years, and always smugly saying "I can quit any time", who then cry "but I can't quit!" You're rightfully excluded from the heart transplant list, even if you need one. Quit first.
Why can't people accept some responsibility for the messes they get themselves in? Plenty of us were warning about the housing bubble back in 2006, and we were told "no, housing always goes up", even though that has NEVER been true. Why should we bail out anyone who was greedy and reckless and didn't listen to the warnings? There were enough of them.
The stuff that drips down your throat naturally is much less contaminated than the crusties in your nose that some people seem to take so much delight in. Don't pick your nose, don't eat your boogers, and you can have my keyboard when you pry it from my cold dead hands - until then, don't put your booger-stained mits on it.
I remember one time when I had to fix a sales reps' computer, and I told the boss "Okay, I'll be back in 15 minutes." Went and bought bright yellow rubber gloves - the kind you use for washing the dishes. He said "you can't work on his computer in front of him like that!" I said "Then you do it - I'll tell you exactly what has to be done, but I'm not touching his keyboard. I know where his hands have been!" His response? "Use the gloves."
It proves that vaccines can have negative effects on immunity to closely-related diseases - which backs up my initial assertion that vaccines can have negative effects on the immune system.
H1N1 isn't any more lethal than other flus. This has been a real exercise in over-hype. People think it's worse than ebola, the way they're acting. It's the flu. It will cull the same (or in this case, fewer) of the population than the normal flu. Just quarantine the people who have it, and take the regular flu precautions (wash your hands, don't let anyone cough on you or use your keyboard, make sure there's adequate ventilation so the level of virus particles in the environment is low, get plenty of rest and eat right).
and if you were around for the 1957 epidemic, relax, unless you have other severe health problems, you're probably immune - the strains are close enough, which explains why older people aren't nearly as susceptible.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA.
Yes, but they are not in Europe. It is still a concern.
Given that the article was about a U.S. hospital, and the bulk of the concerns in the comments were about U.S. vaccination policy, the fact that adjuvants are allowed in Europe really didn't warrant comment. Those vaccines aren't coming here unless the pandemic worsens significantly and there is no way to manufacture additional adjuvant-free vaccine.
With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
Sure about that? First of it's a ridiculous argument, indeed the level of mercury in tuna are alarmingly high, it doesn't make it right. And regardless, you would have to eat a heck of a lot of tuna to equal even one flu shot.
The FDA lists the mean methylmercury content of canned albacore tuna to be .353ppm. That means 6 ounces (170g) of tuna contains approximately 59.5mcg of methylmercury, or slightly more than a 1mg dose of flu vaccine.
The point IS salient becuase despite that level, the FDA has indicated that tuna is safe for children to eat up to 6 ounces per week.
Let me demonstrate and I will give references. The Flu vaccine contains 25mcg of mercury (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/acip/dosage.htm) this is the seasonal flu link, the h1n1 contains the same amount. Oh sure , you can request the single dose without the mercury, but unless you do, your probably getting the multi-dose. The safe level of mercury is 0.1 mcg per kg body weight, (http://www.gotmercury.org/article.php?id=1169) So a 68kg (~150lb) person safe limit is 6.8mcg per day.
Kind of. What you're quoting is a reference dose, and it's a rate with a time component, not just a simple level. The RfD that you're quoting is the EPA's reference dose, and yes, it's .01mcg/kg body weight per day. So on one day, your 68kg person would ingest a higher than recommended amount, but if the person avoid tuna melts for the next week, his reference dose is back within the EPA's recommendation.
It's also worth noting that there are several reference doses issued by different agencies; the EPA's is the most conservative. The World Health Organization has the highest reference dose of 1.6mcg/kg/week of body weight.
So you just shot almost 4 times the safe limit for an average adult directly into your blood stream.
As a point of clarification, vaccines are injected into the muscle, not directly into the blood stream.
Worse the age group for fluzone is 6months or older... a large 6-7m infant might be 10kg as a high avg, that 1mcg safe limit... great you just shot up your infant with 25 times the safe levels.
Of course, that concern is why they also make the vaccine available in preservative-free doses. It's also why pediatricians will discuss the risks and benefits with parents.
This is on top most people already being near or above the safe daily limits taken in from water and foods. Looking at (http://www.csgnetwork.com/hgqtycalc.html) , eating a can of tuna for the same 150lb person a week is just slightly higher than what is considered safe levels. Don't forget children are to get 3 shots, 1 seasonal and 2 h1n1...
With the exception of broken lightbulbs, thermometers, and dental fillings, you've just outlined the major vectors f
She's a physician at hospital in Iowa, received letter that any employee not receiving flu shot would be terminated. She intended to anyway, but anarchist me says refuse just to stick it to the man. She says no and turn the TV down.
I am not a crackpot.
It took me 4 years to realize how good I had it back then
How long will it take you to realize that correlation is not causation? Perhaps until the next time you get a spate of sickness? That flu shot only helps you not get the flu, and while your body is coping with it your immune system is depressed. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're seeing the world through rose-colored petri dishes.
yeah, ok... Thanks for trying to insult me. I must be an idiot for knowing that the slight immune reaction from flu shots was NOTHING like the natural flus I had the last 4 years.
Thanks for being a douche, I love it when you attack me and pretend I'm stupid.
Only in the US, where there still exists the odd notion that health care is not a basic right.
If you're trying to lose the weight, you have my sympathies (a waist is a terrible thing to mind :-) If not, not.
So do you really think, after that lengthy and ignorant diatribe, that your sympathies mean anything to me? For the record, I am trying to lose weight, and yes it is hard (harder than quitting smoking, which I've already done). But whatever. This isn't a talk show, and I'm not going to wade through your post and point out everything wrong with it, because you're not worth the time. I'm also not going to whine to you about how hard it is, and all that shit, because you don't care. And I can even respect that. All I really want to know is; if I can learn how to control what goes into my mouth, and how much, can you learn how to control the steaming brown flow of shit streaming from your own?
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Please cite your source that any known existing form of flu is an airborne disease. I'd like to know who has done this groundbreaking Nobel Prize winning level of research proof, that any form of flu is airborne. Last, I heard there has been no proof that any flu is airborne in the medical sense.
Sure you can catch it is someone sneezes on you, That doesn't make it an airborne disease. It makes it a projected or ejected weapon disease.
Look - if you're one of the morbidly obese, YOU caused your own health problems, not me, not someone else. And as the doctor pointed out in one of the links, the people who died in their hospital from H1N1 were huge, with the health problems that go along with it - if H1N1 hadn't gotten them, something else probably would have within the next 6 months, but it's no surprises that fat slobs are at higher risk.
Everyone else is sick and tired about how so many of the uber-fat, rather than actually trying to shed their excess poundage, want "handicapped status." That's as ironic as someone killing their parents and then asking for mercy because they're an orphan. Want 2 seats on the plane? Pay for them. After all, when you want 2 extra-large pizzas, you pay for both of them.
It's the same with smokers who get cancer and then say "It's not fair! Why me?"
Part of the blame for the epidemic of obesity has to go to food producers who use too much HFCS, just like part of the blame for cancer has to go to the cigarette companies, but they can't claim victim status when they're both the principal architect and a willing, informed participant in bringing about their own situation. This is not something they don't have control over. If they aren't willing to control what they put in their mouth, then they have to accept the consequences, and one of those consequences is higher mortality from any opportunistic infection.
What are they waiting for? A vaccine to cure obesity? Obesity isn't a "disease", though watching the morbidly obese at feeding time WILL make many sick. We see it often enough in restaurants - 4 people come in, somehow manage to sit on the chairs without breaking them, and proceed to eat everything in sight. First thing people do is look in the parking lot to see if there's a car with [$INSERT_EVEN_FATTER_STATE] license plates.
It's having a "spill-over effect" on the general population. Too many of us have forgotten what a person who's not overweight even looks like. Saying "I'm not fat" when they're sedentary, their BMI is over 25, and their waste is bigger than their chest. Yeah, riiiight. Or saying "You need to put on some weight" when the person's BMI is over 25, and they really could afford to lose (and are trying to shed) a few pounds.
H1N1 isn't a serious threat. HFCS, obesity, tobacco - THOSE are threats that make H1N1 look like a case of the hiccups.
Death toll from obesity catches up with tobacco http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Financial-Industry/Death-toll-from-obesity-catches-up-with-tobacco
Smokings Global Death Toll tp:wwwcbsnewscomstories20030912healthmain572833shtml
Almost 5 million people die because of smoking each year.
And now H1N1 is FINALLY sending us the common-sense message that those extra pounds, even if they don't make us officially "morbidly obese", put us at risk
So, they're not "that" fat, but they're big enough that they obviously got more than a few bowls of Crisco in common. Why is this so unexpected? We've been saying for decades that extra pounds are a health risk.
Bad news. You are exposed to hundreds of viruses every day. If being exposed to viruses and antigens is going to cause a bad reaction in you it is going to happen without the flu shot.
Anarchists never rule
There's a big difference between being exposed in the natural environment, when the largest organ your body has - the skin - can protect you, and injecting the stuff directly into you,
Case in point - HIV. There's no evidence that you can get HIV from getting contaminated blood splashed onto intact skin. There's LOTS of evidence for transmission via needle pricks, open sores, etc.
Couple that with the latest news - that previous flu injections can make you twice as susceptible to the H1N1 strain, and you've got to wonder about the advisability of trying to vaccinate against a rapidly-mutating virus.
Not that flu shots are all that trusted anyways - I don't know anyone who bothers with them. When I ask them how many times they've had the flu, most of them are like me - maybe once. I'll take the guarantee of being sick for a week once in my life and getting over it, over the possibility of increased susceptibility to a broad range of auto-immune disasters, like arthritis, in my old age. 10 to 30 years of joint problems isn't worth it, even if the odds are only 1 in 1,000. Actually, if the odds are anything worse than 1 in 52,000 for long-range auto-immune side effects, you're better off with catching the flu - especially a mild strain like H1N1, which is predicted to remain at the low range of lethality.
Another funny thing about this strain - being a fat slob seems to be the #1 indicator of being "at risk". Not just the morbidly obese, but the regular fatties who can still "belly up to the bar" at the all-you-can-eat. Well, it's one way to cull the herd, and encourage people to take better care of themselves, but you're not going to hear much about it, because it's just SO politically incorrect to tell people to stop stuffing their faces like every meal is going to be their last. Like it's politically incorrect for doctors to tell smokers that if they don't want to quit, the doc doesn't want to waste their time when they can be helping patients who DO want to quit. They claim the doctor has a moral obligation to help them, forgetting that (1) the doctor has no obligation to help a patient who won't cooperate in their own care, and (2) they doctor has the same obligation to help others, so since nobody has unlimited time, triage is necessary. Besides, after a few doctors not-so-politely tell them to FOAD if they won't help themselves, some of them get the message and get with the program. The others - they were going to die anyway, so give 'em their darwin.
It might sound cruel, but so is disease, and the biggest health-care problems are self-inflicted lifestyle diseases from smoking and over-eating, not the flu. Just look at the death stats.
As a genuinely disinterested observer, out of context quotes do not trump sworn testimony. If the republicans have evidence that refutes his testimony then why didn't they bring it up at the confirmation? Why aren't they screaming perjury?
"this is the USA. We have a right to a government we can trust. Holdren should be ineligible for government positions of responsibility in a non-totalitarian regime. Maybe someday we can have one of those again."
No you have a right to cast a vote for who YOU trust and a right to observe the ballot count. Holdren also has rights such as the presumption of innocence, and the right to hold and express any OPINIONS he likes, regardless of wether he works for the government or not.
To sack him for him for ANY opinion (let alone one he refutes under oath) would be tantamount to convicting him of a thought crime. When the US starts prosecuting it's government advisers for thought crimes I will accept your proposition that it has become a totalitarian regime.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Here in Australia we have a concept known as "A fair go" -AKA- "A fair suck of the sav".
I genuinely belive you have been mislead by political muck rakers, if you have the courage to entertain self-scepticisim then give Holdren a fair suck of the sav by reading the book in question, or at least use it to put the quotes from your link in context.
Don't get me wrong here I'm not trying to debate your political views or defend Holdren's views. You asked for someone to defend Holdren and I did by pointing out he also has rights under your admirable founding documents.
I'm an old fart, I learnt critical thinking the easy way (ie: early in life), at about age 20 I read a book by James Randi that totally demolished my firmly held belief in the paranormal. Politicians use many of the same phycological tricks that magicians use, since then I have found that going to the source on any issue often results in political enlightenment.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Or you could let nature take its course; be sick for a few days, and your body's immune system is now stronger.
There's a reason that older people are the least likely to devleop swine flu; its because their generation wasn't a bunch of panty-wastes afraid of getting the slightest cold and they didn't run around disinfecting the hell out of evertying. People today are sicker because of this nonsense.
Hmm... I never really got sick that much, but after changing my lifestyle to eating healthy and exercising, I haven't been sick in years. At all. Perhaps its not the shot, its that your lifestyle has reached the tipping point where you're hindering your immune system. And I HAVE been around people who have been sick.
Its ok to get the flu you'll be better off for it, as would everyone else. Think about it... you don't use your muscles, they break down. You need to stress them to improve them. Same for bones (stress, not break..). Same with your brain; you get dumber by not doing anything intelligent.
So why do people want their immune system of all things to NEVER be stressed? It neesd to actually fight disease to know how to do anything.
I too am a skeptic, but the reason for the initial panic, which in retrospect was clearly overblown, is that unlike "normal" flu strains, no one has any immunity to this swine flu. When news first broke, we didn't know that the fatality rate would turn out to be similar to that of the seasonal flu, rather than the spanish flu epidemic. So at the very least there were more differences between the swine flu and seasonal flu than just money.
All those people screaming fascism should consider what they would like to happen if, in the future, a flu strain emerges that has a high fatality rate. Public health is one of the things government is pretty good at, and I'd prefer to be required to have a vaccine than have my cubicle mate give me a preventable high-mortality disease.
All that said, and NY requiring health care workers to get the flu shot is a PR disaster. Health care workers should all get the flu shot, but in this particular case, it shouldn't be required because the push-back is likely to have more serious consequences than having a few people opt out.
I'm sure that anyone who gets recurring Guillain-Barré Syndrome as a result of a flu shot will be mighty happy to lose their job as a result of mandatory vaccination.
My father knows of 2 people, relative and acquaintance, who suffered from GBS after a vaccination (likely the 1976 one mentioned in the articles), one of whom died from complications from it. He has declined to get vaccinated because of it, and frankly I don't blame him. He has been through times when vaccinations were even more unreliable, and riskier, than they are today. And I don't consider them that big a panacea today, myself.
That would be a GOOD THING (tm). If it happened, we would be a much healthier population, because this flu is pretty mild - it's taking out mostly the morbidly obese (who, as one doctor pointed out wrt the ones who died, were sick enough that they were probably going to die anyway within 6 months) and those with severe underlying diseases (almost all the infant deaths had neurological problems). Interestingly enough, this variant is showing a preference wrt death rates, not must for the morbidly obese, but the "ordinary obese" as well. Now if we could just engineer it so that it kills off smokers in 7 days, rather than tobacco killing them in 20 years, everyone would stop smoking within a week (one way or another). Can I get my research grant now?
There's ALWAYS a silver lining, Skippy.
Also, mass immunization isn't insurance against a mutation. Look at what's happening in Nigeria, where the polio vaccine mutated last year and is now the cause of the majority of polio cases.
It's not speculation - it's happening right now. Makes me wonder about the wisdom uf rushing out deployment of the "live virus" nasal vaccine. Gives a nice pool of infected people with the real McCoy. If you're looking for a mutation to happen, that's where it'll come from.
That's simply not true. Anyone who was around during the 1957 flu season and isn't immuno-compromised has at least partial immunity. That's why it's not going after "the old folks" so much - they're mostly already immune.
So certainly requiring health-care workers over the age of 52 to get a flu shot is just bad science.
Also, the people who are twice as likely to catch this strain are those who have had flu shots in previous years. And those who are going to die from it are mostly the morbidly obese, and to a lesser extent, the obese, and those who have underlying health problems. For example, almost all the infants who have died so far had severe neurological problems, so if the flu hadn't gotten them, something else probably would have. It's opportunistic in that sense, and, while it's going to sound cruel and politically incorrect, in some cases, it's probably for the best.
It's not as simple and cut-and-dried as they make it out to be. Certainly, nothing to justify making the evening news.
That would be a GOOD THING (tm). If it happened, we would be a much healthier population, because this flu is pretty mild -
Well, Skippy, if the lethality of the flu jumps greatly (so that it is far from being "pretty mild"), guess who's more likely to die of it? People with health immune systems that overreact to the disease. The 1918 flu (which this variant is related to) is well documented as killing inordinate amounts of healthy people (via a "cytokine storm"), not just the groups that you seem to have a problem with. The early deaths in Mexico had to my understanding relatively high proportions of young and middle aged adults. The strain later settled into more traditional mortality patterns of flus. Currently it still has a somewhat higher infection rate compared to regular flus.
Mass immunization isn't perfect protection against an epidemic? Who'd have thunk that? Perhaps if you had read my post, you would have seen that I already took that into account. Even if the disease mutates, immunization can provide increased resistance (and put off the cytokine storm which I gather is a last resort defense). Diseases don't automatically bypass immunizationw when they mutate.
The wikipedia article is total bullshit. We know, contrary to the wiki article, that the majority of deaths from the 1918 flu were caused by bacterial pneumonia. They didn't have antibiotics then, and it's hard to observe simple hygiene when the whole world is at war, and tens of millions are engaged in trench warfare.
Your "cytokine storm" is nothing but an urban legend. Same as "spinach is good for you because it has lots of iron" is also totally false, and was propagated for decades because of a misplaced decimal point in one government chart.
But thanks for playing, and showing how easy people buy into the hype.
You still don't get it, do you? Go back and look over my posts to you, and re-read them, and ask yourself this: where in those posts did I once even dispute any fact, claim or reference that you've made here?
No seriously, go back and check. The post will wait.
Did you check? If you did, you'd have noticed that not once have I tried to argue you about H1N1, obesity, the efficacy of hygeine in flu prevention, or anything else. I made one comment about your ignorance, in general terms, but that's it.
I read your posts, immediately had the urge to disagree with everything you've said, and then asked myself why. I came to the conclusion that it was your combative, insulting tone that put me off your message. I thought (more fool me) that you would maybe be wondering why everyone was flaming you, ignoring your sources and trashing your posts. Apparently, I was wrong. Won't be the last time, no doubt. But not to worry, I won't give you any grief over your combative (and counter-productive) style, ever again. You clearly either don't care, or are incapable of recognizing that you even have a problem. Either way, it's really none of my business, so merry trolling to you, sir.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
well you're right about people over 52 possessing partial immunity. I'm not sure if there has been any analysis on whether the H1N1 vaccine provides any additional boost to immunity, but it may.
You're not twice as likely to catch the swine flu if you've gotten flu vaccines in previous years. There was an interesting study done in Canada that found increased incidence of H1N1 among those who received the seasonal flu shot this year. As is oft repeated on slashdot correlation is not causation. Additionally, no one else has been able to reproduce these findings - it could be a quirk of confidence intervals or just plain bad methodology. The canadian data isn't published and hasn't been released. The CDC has looked at their data and found no such connection, and neither has anyone else. one source
If you're not in a high risk group (pregnant, compromised immune system, obese, very young, health care worker etc.) it's a good idea to get the vaccine when it becomes available, but no one's going to make you. If you're in a high risk group it's a really good idea to get the shot, but still no one's going to make you - unless you're a health care worker in New York.
At this point the swine flu isn't very news worthy, with the exception that the media plays an important roll in public health announcements like, "the vaccine will be available soon." In April, when we first found out that there was a novel flu strain it was very news worthy.
Finally, I'm going to repeat what I thought was the most important point of my initial post. What should the government do if a high mortality rate disease breaks out for which a vaccine exists?
Which is why I *also* said that people who are trying to lose weight have my sympathy and support, and that both the food companies who over-use HFCS, and the tobacco companies, should also be held accountable.
How can I make it plainer that my beef is with the lazy fat self-indulgent slobs who refuse to take any responsibility for their current state, want to blame it all on anyone and everyone else, and even actively sabotage efforts by others to get healthier.
Those people deserve whatever they get. Whether it's the flu or any other opportunistic virus, we're better off without them trying to play the blame game. Not the ones trying to fight the good fight against the flab.
It's the same as smokers who can't be arsed to quit, offering cigarettes to those who are trying, or who have already quit. Or crack-heads trying to keep their friends hooked so they can sponge more crack money off them. Or parents who feed their kids 4 helpings to make up for the lack of attention they otherwise give, which is just insidious in its' long-term effects. Or the alkie who keeps trying to get their now-sober buddies to have "just one drink."
In all these cases, there's a victim, and an victimizer. I simply don't have any patience or sympathy for the victimizers whatsoever, who are undermining the people around them. The "lazy fat slobs" who are dying of H1N1 are not the same people who trying to lose the weight, so this disease, while opportunistic, seems to be culling mostly the "right" targets more often than not (though there are always exceptions).
Sure, its not PC to say such things, but it's also not PC to say that homeowners who lied on their mortgages applications deserve jail time. And yet, how is their fraud any different? They're just as much criminals as the guy who passes a phony check. Both let their greed get the better of them, and both committed fraud.
Considering that they won't know that it's high-mortality until it actually kills of tons of people, by which time it's too late to get it into production and distribution, nothing beyond encouraging quarantines and proper hygiene to prevent transmission.
Places that put quarantines into effect in time in 1918 didn't get sick.
So - what could the government do that would actually be effective?
The last three should have been done months ago, if you're serious about dealing with this or any similar infection. If you read through the thread, you'll see that there are still people who don't believe that simple things like washing your hands can be effective, even though both the WHO and the CDC recommend it. The message isn't getting out, because people have placed too much emphasis on a "cure", and not on prevention.
That's a major policy failure.
We know, contrary to the wiki article, that the majority of deaths from the 1918 flu were caused by bacterial pneumonia.
Wikipedia doesn't say that. And you don't get it. So what if most 1918 flu deaths didn't come directly from the flu? I read several books on the 1918 flu pandemic. They indicate a lot of people survived "cytokine storm" symptoms (some only to die of pneumonia symptoms later). Further, we've actually seen cases in the past few years of the cytokine storm. There were a number of bird flu cases, for example. So it's not just an "urban myth". The World Health Organization has some literature on that subject.
And I don't understand your complaint about spinach. This link seems to indicate that despite your supposed myth busting that spinach is a considerable source of iron. That link even suggests ways to overcome the digestive difficulties that reduce intake of iron from spinach. Sure there was an erroneous study, but spinach still turns out to be a source of iron despite the errors in that study.
I've looked through my posts as well as a portion of the Slashdot comments and you're the only person pushing this silliness and vitriol. I have no idea why you're so hung up on "fatties" and smokers, but you've repeatedly obsessed over them in several posts now. A simpler solution than killing all the fatties and smokers is for you to get your head screwed on straight.
Oh, com off it, that's an outright lie - Wikipedia DOES say exactly that exactly that, both in the article about the 1918 flue:
and in the general article about influenza pandemics
And in both cases, it's in the same paragraph as the speculation about "cytokine storms". Word-for-word, both articles agree that bacterial pneumonia was not just the #1, but the majority, cause of death. Not some theoretical "cytokine storm", which even the WHO has no basis other than speculation, as in this article.
The theory doesn't fit the facts that we know, just like your claim that Wikipedia doesn't say that bacterial pneumonia caused most deaths. People died mostly of bacterial pneumonia in the middle of a flu epidemic in the middle of a world war that caused many to be malnourished, and exposed tens of millions to local diseases that they would never have encountered before - and most would have survived with antibiotics, which just hadn't been discovered yet.
Ah, yes, kill the messenger.
It might be unpopular to say it, but people have to take some responsibility for being over-weight. Don't want to be more prone to sickness because you're morbidly obese? Then stop eating so much! Don't want to be more prone to cancer from smoking? Then quit smoking! Don't want to pick up an opportunistic infection when you can reduce your risk by simple hygiene? Then teach your kids to wash their hands and stop picking their noses!
It's not a question of "obsessing over fatties" - it's pointing out that the stats are skewed, and that if you're not overweight, you have a much lower risk profile. This means that a lot of people who are panicking, shouldn't be. H1N1 is like any other opportunistic virus. Don't want to be a target? Reduce your profile - in this case, literally.
This is all stuff that should be obvious, but instead we have people going in a panic and making uninformed decisions - like the "everyone MUST get a shot" one, when there's lots of evidence that people who were around during the 1957 epidemic don't need one, can't benefit from one, and shouldn't have to be put in such a position.
The fat epidemic kills more people every year. We can solve it by banning HFCS in soft drinks and processed foods, and ending agricultural subsidies that make junk cheaper than real food. Tobacco kills more people every year, and we can prevent that too, but no, we won't. That would require people to *gasp* get a fucking clue and exercise some self-control. Any politician who recommends that course of action will be out of office really quick.
Doesn't make it any less true. Which begs the question - who are the ones who really have their heads screwed on crooked? The people advocating personal responsibility and better health? I don't think so.
As for "killing all the fatties and smokers" - they've already volunteered to do the job themselves. What are YOU doing to warn them?
Maybe, maybe not. This case in particular illustrates one way we can have plenty of warning - the disease was first spotted at the tail end of the flu season and we got to watch it develop in the southern hemisphere and learn A LOT between April and August. Had this flu strain proved to be particularly deadly, we would have known by July - and at that point the vaccine production was already well on its way. (obviously in the interim, a lot of people in the southern hemisphere would have died if the disease were particularly deadly, but that doesn't stop us from protecting our population - the same would be true in reverse if the disease had popped up in the northern hemisphere's summer or early fall.)
I'm not scoffing at the idea that hand washing and self-quarantine are effective measures, just pointing out that widespread vaccination resulting in herd immunity is more effective. There are somethings you can't control, sometimes you just get sneezed on. An effective and mandatory vaccination program can save a lot of lives - like it did and continues to do with measles.
There's only so much you can change human behavior. School children in particular will never be as hygienic as you may want them to be. Vaccination isn't a cure - it is a preventative measure.
And in both cases, it's in the same paragraph as the speculation about "cytokine storms". Word-for-word, both articles agree that bacterial pneumonia was not just the #1, but the majority, cause of death. Not some theoretical "cytokine storm", which even the WHO has no basis other than speculation, as in this article.
So? That's exactly what you've said and what I've said. The difference is that you fail to recognize that someone suffering from a cytokine storm is more susceptible to dying from pneumonia (their lungs being in much worse shape as well as the traditional weakened immune system) and that this fits with the observations both of cytokine storm symptoms in humans and in the observation that healthier people died during the 1918 pandemic more frequently than people in populations with traditionally weaker immune systems. Incidentally, your citation doesn't support your claim of "speculation" since they actually have autopsies of people who died from cytokine storm symptoms. In other words, "speculation" based on hard evidence not just speculation.
The theory doesn't fit the facts that we know, just like your claim that Wikipedia doesn't say that bacterial pneumonia caused most deaths. People died mostly of bacterial pneumonia in the middle of a flu epidemic in the middle of a world war that caused many to be malnourished, and exposed tens of millions to local diseases that they would never have encountered before - and most would have survived with antibiotics, which just hadn't been discovered yet.
So? Are you claiming that just any flu would have caused the same level of deaths? And how do you explain the large number of deaths from influenza in other parts of the world that weren't malnourished? Remember not everyone was sitting in a trench in Europe. Malnourishment doesn't explain the deaths in the US, for example.
Kids learn from their parents. Look how many adults still pick their noses at traffic lights. I've even honked my horn to let them know I'm taking pictures with my cell phone, just to see the expression on their faces when they know they've been caught.
It's pretty bad when you're talking to a grown adult, and all of a sudden, with no warning, their finger just disappears up their snout. I have to wonder, do they even realize what they're doing? Is it *that* ingrained?
Problem is that your proposed cytokine storm model has zero to do with bacterial pneumonia - and that's what killed them, not pneumonia from a viral infection, but from a bacterial infection due to a weakened immune system.
The flu weakened them, they caught pneumonia, they died. No "cytokine storm" can cause bacteria to spontaneously be generated and infect the lungs. People sick with the flu, poor ventilation trying to keep warm, sharing blankets, etc. ... and yes, bacterial pneumonia typically is caught when the immune system is already under assault from flu or even a really nasty cold.
The same goes for the people in the US - a new virus, lots of people going from place to place so the virus continues to find fresh populations to infect (the car was just starting to be popular then), and wartime privations domestically all attributed to the flu of 1918 being worse than average. Also (1) places that introduced a quarantine didn't get infected, and (2) statistically, not every flu season will be average. There HAVE to be worse-than-average, to balance out the not-so-bad, or the average would change. (3) It's cyclical for the same reason that forest fires are cyclical - eventually enough dead material accumulates in a forest, and you have a major fire, just as eventually you have enough people who lack exposure to a particular strain of flu and a lot of them will get sick at the same time. It's entirely natural and normal.
Problem is that your proposed cytokine storm model has zero to do with bacterial pneumonia - and that's what killed them, not pneumonia from a viral infection, but from a bacterial infection due to a weakened immune system.
Please read my post. I already explained how it works. If your lungs are still messed up from a bout of cytokine storm, then you are more likely to die from anything that infects your lungs soon after.
Try "if your respiratory system is messed up from a bout of the flu" rather than a bogus "cytokine storm" and you're right.
Everyone going on about 1918 seems to forget that things were a lot different a century ago. Most jobs were dusty, "doctors" would prescribe "cures" that were worse than the disease (like prescribing turpentine for lung problems and cancer...), heating and lighting often also were semi-toxic due to poor ventilation and bad design, living quarters were often cramped and didn't have adequate ventilation (or too much ventilation - drafty and cold), people often shared "the facilities" in tenements - ideal conditions for sickness to spread from person to person, refrigerators - rare, patent medicines flourished (including those that claimed snake-oil as a curative agent - hence the term snake-oil salesmen).
This was the time when
It didn't stop ... it continued right up to the 2nd world war. Heck, Coca-cola, 7-Up and Hires Root Beer were all supposed to be "good for what ails ya."
Also, what good would washing your hands do in those days when you wiped them on a contaminated towel ...
Tuberculosis, "consumption", etc., poor living and working conditions, and quacks prescribing quick-buck "cures." Of course disease and death would be higher than today.
No one has the right to be Science czar. Sacking him is not "convicting him" of anything. If it were, then the same thing happened to me when I wasn't given the job of Science Czar.
I understand your position, but I disagree with giving evil people power based on assurances. He can have the benefit of the doubt without serving as Science Czar. He would be a poor choice even it he hadn't written that book.
Everyone going on about 1918 seems to forget that things were a lot different a century ago.
Unlike most ancient plagues, the 1918 pandemic is something that could happen today. Maybe we'd be better off due to better medicine and such, but we are more vulnerable in other ways (air travel, even more elaborate transportation infrastructure). It's not clear to me that we're prepared to quarantine properly or that our medical and transportation systems will bear up under a strong assault. If within a few weeks of the outbreak of a lethal strain, your medical system degrades back to the equivalent of 1918 medical care (particularly overwhelmed 1918 medical care as in the pandemic), then you don't really have a medical advantage over 1918. In order for antibiotics to work, those drugs need to be shipped to the people that need them. That means you need healthy drivers willing to work, diesel fuel, and working trucks. Will we have enough respirators and other equipment for the tough cases?
My view is that the only real medical improvement over 1918 is the flu vaccine. Making a significant portion of your population, at least partly resistant (or more resistant as the case may be), is a great improvement over 1918. As I see it, the current medical defenses against a 1918 flu variant just aren't that good. We have strong initial defenses which can slow the initial spread of the flu. But once those are overwhelmed (especially if a mutation gets around the flu vaccine resistance), then we're in the same situation as almost a century ago.
Finally, as I've mentioned before, they've observed the "cytokine storm" in a few recent cases of avian flu. It doesn't qualify as "bogus".
The living conditions are a lot different from 1918. We don't have as many people sharing communal toilets, or using outhouses; we don't have 10 million people sitting in trenches every day fighting trench warfare, waist-deep in mud for weeks at a time; we don't have homes that are as poorly ventilated; we don't have workplaces that have as many dust and other particulates in the air to scar the lungs. We don't have that many places where everyone in the tenement uses the same washroom and the same toilets. We have such modern stuff as refrigerators. We no longer believe that turpentine or coca-cola are "remedies for what ails you." We know that simple things, like washing your hands, makes a difference. We don't have as many people using the same cloth handkerchief over and over all day, accumulating and dispersing the little buggies.
Even if we didn't also have antibiotics, 1918 can't happen today, for the simple reason that people are in a healthier environment, and most of us eat better than people in a World War.
It's the same as a bunch of dogs in an overcrowded puppy mill with poor ventilation, lousy sanitation, and the same bunch of dogs dispersed into many homes, with good food and ventilation. Diseases that will decimate the first group won't make much headway in the second, because of the different environmental conditions.
Ok, I'll buy that. The politics of the day also made matters worse. Winning the war was often considered more important than preventing the spread of influenza. So news about the flu along with good hygiene and public health information was often suppressed in order to prevent "public panic" (which in practice often meant hiding signs of government incompetence).
But in my view, I see two things. First, immunization when it is available is part of good hygiene. Second, even with good hygiene, there's no obvious reason why a virulent and lethal disease can't spread through the population. After all, the regular flu, colds, etc already spread even in the presence of today's better hygiene. Evolution will probably keep a lethal disease from surviving in its lethal state for long, but a lot of people could die in the meantime. And for a disease of sufficient lethality, being healthy just means you might take a little longer to die.
Every place that instituted a trave embargo avoided anyone coming down with the flu in 1918. Sure, a virulent and lethal disease can still spread through the population if they don't take measures to prevent it - but the measures to prevent the transmission of both colds and flu are simple - the problem is that people don't even want to do the simple things. The majority of adults (77% of men, 49% of women) still pick their boogers. If they can't master something as simple and obvious as "don't pick your nose and then touch something - you'll contaminate it", it's partly because there's a taboo surrounding talking about it. It's the same as when there was an outbreak of shigella among Jewish children here - doctors felt they had to be careful not to offend the jewish community by saying "your kids need to learn to (1) learn how to wipe their asses properly and (2) wash their hands afterwards.
It's also why sinestrance survives - right-handed people mostly eat with the same hand they wipe with, left-handed ones, tending to be more ambidextrous, often wipe with the non-dominant hand. That must have come in handy back in the leaves and pine-cone days :-)
Then there's the whole reactive arthritis problem - more infections, more chance of arthritis. So aside from the inconvenience of dealing with a bout of shigella, they're also now higher-risk for arthritis, simply because they failed basic hygiene.
We really need to get the message out that, just because we have all sorts of fancy anti-bacterial house-cleaning sprays doesn't mean we can abdicate practicing and teaching proper basic hygiene. The problem being that those who can't be arsed to wash their hands properly after going to the bathroom aren't just putting themselves at risk, as we saw with the shigella outbreak, and as we see every cold and flu season when people cough into their hands, or pick their noses, or use the same soggy contaminated wadded-up kleenex or hanky a second time. etc.
But we don't, because that would offend the 3/4 of the population who pick their noses, don't wash their hands, etc. And then they have the nerve to want to use my keyboard. They can have my keyboard when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
When did Slashdot's audience turn from nerds (a category of people that, on the whole, love science and the benefits that science has brought us) into science deniers willing to grant fringe arguments equal validity to the work of dedicated scientists?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
On the level of cellular/molecular adaptation and reaction, the vaccine suffices to serve the same as a full infection; the difference being the degree to which you're encumbered by the immune response.
"When the listen to stupid advice because you are some sort of public figure, I agree there should be some responsibility on the part of the public figure."
Absolutely not. Political commentators should not have their first amendment rights revoked simply because people are stupid. That's what's being suggested here, that public people should be held accountable for what people do after listening to them, SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE PUBLIC.
It makes sense that doctors, lawyers, people in positions of authority, etc. should be held accountable, because they're expected (both by the public and by law) to give advice. But not fucking comedians.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
If that's true, then why do we need the same flu vaccine each year? Why do elderly people already seem to have a good immunity towards the newest swine flu strain?
Normally I agree that vaccines are a good idea... but something seems exteremly fishy about the flu vaccine in particular.
If that's true, then why do we need the same flu vaccine each year? Why do elderly people already seem to have a good immunity towards the newest swine flu strain?
Normally I agree that vaccines are a good idea... but something seems exteremly fishy about the flu vaccine in particular.
I'll first let you know that I have much education in cellular/molecular biology; I am qualified to explain this rather elementary biological concept.
I will try to keep this simple:
When foreign proteins are introduced into your system, your body attaches to some of them and, in a way, identifies a specific part of the protein. Your immune system then develops antibodies that are VERY specific to attach to that very specific protein. This is important because your whole body contains TONS of various proteins, some of which are even from other organisms, such as the bacteria in your gut that help you digest (your 'symbiotic' relationship with them is a GOOD thing, you don't want them killed).
So, one thing to know, is that genetic mutations, especially in viruses, happen quite commonly. Mutations lead to variations in proteins, and thus even though a protein may be 95% the way it was when your body made an antibody, it is NOT the same, and the body must develop NEW antibodies.
Once the antibody and immune response is ready, the body cannot (generally) be reinfected by the same virus. It is because of mutation and recombination (say, a human flu virus with a pig flu virus thanks to close proximity of humans/pigs and similar genetics), that viruses change enough to still infect you.
A vaccine is usually just some parts of a viral protein, or a deactivated virus (which has proteins). Or some system that presents/produces proteins, from the virus you want to be immune to, to your immune system. But since they are inactivated, your body develops an immune response that protects you from infection but without the virus actually being capable of infection.
So, the reason you need a vaccine each year is the same reason you would get the flu each year (whether or not you get bad symptoms or not). The virus has mutated or recombined with similar other viruses and now your antibodies and immune system don't work on this one until it develops antibodies, etc.
Let me know if this is clear enough. I can reword or dig up some literature for you if necessary.
Thanks, but you've not really told me anything I haven't known, unless you're asserting that the flu mutates much more frequently than almost any other virus. MMR are also viruses which I assume also mutate.. yet a few shots during childhood is all that seems to be needed.
The flu vaccine seems like it was invented just to be a money printing press for the companies that make it, and the flu kills far less people that traffic accidents do each year.
Thanks, but you've not really told me anything I haven't known, unless you're asserting that the flu mutates much more frequently than almost any other virus. MMR are also viruses which I assume also mutate.. yet a few shots during childhood is all that seems to be needed.
The flu vaccine seems like it was invented just to be a money printing press for the companies that make it, and the flu kills far less people that traffic accidents do each year.
Dude, living organisms and viruses are all unique. Each has various reproductive and life cycle properties, and in cases of transmitted disease, unique mutation/recombination properties, infectious properties, and transmission properties.
In regards to the Flu, the virii are constantly infecting millions around the world and using those bodies as growth chambers (until they are healthy) while undergoing mutations/recombinations. The virus has a protenaceous coat that is more resistant to the outer-body environment, especially in colder seasons, and is easily transmitted.
On the contrary, Mumps, Measles, and Rubella are nearly wiped out world wide; as a result of this, very few infections occur and people are rarely in contact with any potential mutated outcome, though that is possible. Quite possibly the transmission potentials and infection potentials are lower as well.
You must consider, we get about 3 Flus each year because of mutation/recombination, but that is only even possible because we have so many millions of people infected, constantly and consistently, that serve as big virus factories. In the case of MMR virii, this simply isn't real. If it were, we would definitely be seeing new requirements for vaccination.
Intuition and knowledge = answers.
"no serious text can get around scientific fact just to present and position their own product. (The faculty, after all, have to approve the referenced texts, and precious few of them desire to be perceived as corporate shills.)"
So you've either never been to college or you simply accepted what was put in front of you... more proof that higher education in America is going more towards the "teaching people WHAT to think" instead of "teaching people HOW to think."
Most of the faculty would never purposely be corporate shills, but they will easily perpetuate "facts" that are "accepted" even if not true. Eggs are good for you. No, they're not. Yes, they are. etc. Pick almost any topic and you'll see a pendulum both in the "facts" and what is taught.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
The virus has a protenaceous coat that is more resistant to the outer-body environment, especially in colder seasons, and is easily transmitted.
Huh... and yet is killed with exposure to sunlight.
On the contrary, Mumps, Measles, and Rubella are nearly wiped out world wide; as a result of this, very few infections occur and people are rarely in contact with any potential mutated outcome, though that is possible. Quite possibly the transmission potentials and infection potentials are lower as well.
Yet the flu continues unabated. And then we have this: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/10/17/1651206
I'd like to know, where is the double-blink placebo study that shows the flu vaccine is effective? Care to point it out to me?
Dude, cherry picking articles that are convenient to preserve ignorant opinion won't get you far with me. Notice the stipulations of that article are exclusive, not inclusive.
I'm not on campus right now but I bet I could dig up a ton of primary published scientific literature with data to support the efficacy of Flu vaccines.
A quick dig with Google Scholar yielded this (if you wanna get to the 'answer' just go to the Conclusions section:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/281/10/908
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/331/12/778
http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:ASHZ--Eay88J:scholar.google.com/+flu+vaccine&hl=en
http://journals.lww.com/joem/Abstract/1997/05000/Cost_Effectiveness_of_the_Influenza_Vaccine_in_a.6.aspx (this only shows the abstract, but the last line of the abstract is a short version of the conclusion)
------
And those are just from the first 10 results. I've informed you plenty; from here you can accept new information and begin to learn, or you can ignore it, use selective reading, and maintain ignorance. From here I assume you will become irrational so I will leave this conversation now.
Fyi, light can degrade organic compounds, to include proteins. And while I do not claim to clearly understand the properties of influenza virus, I cannot, like you, purport absolution in an argument for the presence of miniscule anecdotal observation.
On having a healthy weight, see "Learn how to escape the dietary pleasure trap!"
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
"The modern American diet contains concentrations of chemicals that we were never meant to consume. As food manufacturers have sought to compete with each other, foods have become increasingly artificial--loaded with ever-higher concentrations of pleasure-inducing chemicals, such as sugar, salt, and fat. But curiously, though the concentrations of these chemicals have escalated, the actual pleasure from eating has always stayed about the same. We now understand why. As our modern foods have become increasingly stimulating, our taste nerves are becoming desensitized--neuro-adapting to the modern diet's excessive stimulation. This sets the stage for a devastating trap, wherein a health-promoting diet is relatively unappealing. Fortunately, you now understand what it takes to escape this deceptive dietary trap. With consistent discipline, or perhaps an occasional period of supervised, water-only fasting, you can always get yourself back on track. In doing so, you will discover--or perhaps re-discover--that the diet of our natural design can be very enjoyable."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.