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Nationwide Shortage In Supply of Swine Flu Vaccine
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that as the number of swine flu cases grows to levels unprecedented for this time of year, health officials predict a shortfall in the supply of swine flu vaccine. Forty-three children have died from swine flu since August 30 — about the same number that usually die in an entire flu season.' These are very sobering statistics,' says Dr. Anne Schuchat, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, 'and unfortunately they are likely to increase.' Projections of the supply of swine flu vaccine have widely varied. During the summer, health officials said 120 million doses would be ready in October but later dropped the estimate to 40 million doses. Now officials expect only 28 million to 30 million doses, adding that the exact number is impossible to predict and could change daily as vaccine manufacturers report that production was behind schedule. 'Vaccine production for influenza is pretty complex,' says Schuchat explaining the delay, 'and the complex process this year is taking a bit longer than we had hoped.' Schuchat warned parents with sick children to be alert for signs that medical attention is required including not eating well, difficulties breathing, and turning blue or gray. A particularly important sign is when children start to get better, then have a relapse, usually a sign that pneumonia is developing, and immediate treatment should be sought."
I found that number to be way low, as well, given the number of deaths attributed to seasonal flu on a yearly basis. However:
From the CDC Website: ( http://www.cdc.gov/FLU/about/qa/0607season.htm#children )
During the 2003-04 Season, 153 flu-associated deaths in children were reported to CDC.
During the 2004-05 Season, 47 deaths in children were reported to CDC.
During the 2005-06 Season, 46 deaths in children were reported to CDC.
As of August 6, 2007, 68 deaths in children occurring during the 2006-07 season have been reported to CDC.
It makes a difference. All forms of influenza are devastating to an ill child. We must assume that some ill children have been exposed to H1N1 by now. So, which is the case:
1) All 43 were ill
2) None of th 43 were ill
3) Some portion of the 43 were ill
Also bear in mind that this is only about twice (possibly trending towards three times) as deadly as using school-buses:
"Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year." http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statistics.html
The 1918 pandemic was certainly something that we do not wish to see repeated. However, it was deadlier than this situation on the order of millions of times more.
Please stop scaring people. Please?
What would your aunt expect to see at the hospital? All the healthy people who had flu shots with no side effects? Nothing is 100% safe.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
What? That's insane and selfish.
A) Without the vaccine you can develop pretty serious health issues.
B) You will then spread it to others. H1N1 is contagious 3 days before symptoms show up. So you will spread it to someone else, possible someone less healthy then you.
C) the that are vaccinated the smaller the impact of the disease.
Really, two pokes and 5 minutes is better the H1N1.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...we need to let our immune system do what it does best, figure out problems for itself. One would think that constant vaccine's, medications, antibiotics, etc just make the immune system lazy.
Yeah, humanity got through Bubonic Plague just fine without a vaccine. And that Polio vaccine some wise guy came up with? Useless. Also, you seem to lack an understanding how vaccines work, as they stimulate the immune system into producing specific antibodies, which is essentially the opposite of making it lazy.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
"One would think that constant vaccine's, medications, antibiotics, etc just make the immune system lazy."
If you had any clue about how vaccines work you would realize how silly this statement is. A vaccine trains your immune system similar to a runner training for a marathon.
Instead of doing a flu shot a few years back I got a pneumonia vaccine. Usually it is the pneumonia that kills you when you get the flu. It doesn't protect you against all forms of pneumonia, but as an added side affect if I get hospitalized for some other reason my chance of getting a secondary pneumonia infection is reduced.
The other bonus is you get one or two shots in your lifetime instead of having to get a shot every year. I guess I'm a bit more trusting of a vaccine that doesn't seem to revolve around a yearly profit cycle.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
[Citation Needed]. Do you have any quarterly/annual reports to back that up?
The reason this country has gone from 20+ flu vaccine manufacturers a decade ago to 2 today is because it's so unprofitable. It's possible the companies will make a profit on it this year because of the virulence of H1N1, but claiming some sort of profit motive for annual fly vaccine is, from my understanding, wildly innaccurate.
E pluribus unum
Well I do find it interesting that all over the news there are many health care workers who don't care to get the shot.
You may find it interesting that there are pharmacists, doctors, and nurses who feel it is their right to decide whether a patient even has the option of a morning-after pill or abortion. Now how do you feel about whether someone who chose to work in the medical field is permitted to inject their own dogma into your medical treatment?
Medical "professionals" and workers are expected to follow medical science, not superstition or personal beliefs and morals- and look out for the interests of their patient, not themselves or their own dogma. They knew that going in the door. Among other things, the first thing you are expected to do as an employee of a hospital is get all your vaccinations up to date.
Please help metamoderate.
My aunt is a nurse at one of the largest hospitals in Winnipeg and she said she has never gotten the flu shot and refuses too. After she's seen all the complications with them over the years she figures she's safer without.
So your aunt works in health care and refuses to protect herself from becoming a carrier of an easily preventable communicable disease? You mean because she doesn't think she will get sick means she doesn't feel like taking a simple step to ensure she doesn't transmit it to a very young or old patient who would become seriously ill and possibly die? What a bitch!
Sure, the flu isn't highly fatal, but it's not something to ignore. People do die, sometimes unexpectedly, even though it is uncommon. If she doesn't want to take steps to protect other people's health, why the fuck is she a nurse?
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Your Aunt is wrong and she should learn to read studies, understand statistics, and realize she works in a place sick people tend to go to. i.e. sample bias.
"we need to let our immune system do what it does best, figure out problems for itself."
That is exactly what a vaccine does, just without all the nasty sickness and death.
". One would think that constant vaccine's, medications, antibiotics, etc just make the immune system lazy."
One would be wrong. one could read studies. But no, one spouts off nonsense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A nurse (or anyone else working in a health care institution) needs to be immunized, because they have constant contact with the segment of the population who is most at risk from the flu. If a nurse gives your newborn the flu because she didn't get the vaccine and your child dies, there would be hell to pay. Seems like a legitimate issue to me, if not for the nurse/doctor's health but for the health of those they care for.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
"mexican flu (that's the name btw.) No it's not.
I know! Everybody knows that the REAL name is hamthrax. Or is it bacon plague? Pork lung? Damnit, I can't remember now...
*facepalm*
All what complications with the flu shot? Feeling queasy for an afternoon? Mild irritation at the injection site? Ok - don't get it if you're allegic to eggs. You're more likely to die from the flu outright than come down with the only major complication, Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Vaccines are one of the single greatest success stories of modern medicine. Our body is designed to fight off polio and smallpox too, but wasn't quite up to the task before vaccines.
If you or your aunt thinks getting vaccines is counter productive, you're morons.
1. Your girlfriend got lucky, at least a little. One of my coworkers wasn't so lucky. She died from H1N1, and it wasn't pretty. One could argue that it takes bad luck(and pre-existing conditions) to die from the flu, most cases aren't bad, but even if the death rate was .1%, that's still 100 dead out of 100k infections.
2. Being in the hospital predisposes you to see the bad effects. Kinda like how if you work in a prison you'll see more criminals.
3. Vaccines aren't a cure. If you view viruses like terrorists(who all share a family resemblence), a vaccine is like distributing a rap/identification sheet. Your immune system still has to respond to fight the infection, it just gets a leg up. Against a replicating 'enemy', said leg up can be the difference between life and death.
You might have an arguement about the antibiotics, but that's a 'too late, open another front in the war' - the immune system has already been roused.
If anything, antibacterial soap and sanitizing cleaning products would make a better target. But even then, how much is it our immune systems 'getting lazy' and how much is 'people with weak immune systems aren't dying early'?
I don't read AC A human right
Our health provider is "limiting" the vaccine to certain risk groups. These include pregnant ladies, children under a certain age, people with asthma or other chronic airway issues, and so forth. In other words, the specific groups they want to get vaccinated for flu every year.
A few comments about this virus and why vaccination is important:
H1N1 is a combination not seen for at least thirty+ years. Therefore, much of the population has never been exposed to the "surface codes" H1 or N1, which means they don't have partial immunity. This worries medical professionals, since that increases the virulence and the spread if this flu mutates into a deadlier form. (Generally, the flu shifts a few points. This is a major antigen shift.)
Vaccines do not have a 100% success rate. Some people's immune systems don't respond, so while they've been vaccinated, they don't have immunity and are still at risk. However, if the percentage of immunes is high enough, the particular disease never has a chance to get to those who are vulnerable. This is why anti-vaccination efforts are anti-social: your un-vaccinated kid can give my infant or elderly grandmother whooping cough or measles. (There have been a number of immune-compromised people in my family, and my parents watched family members and friends die from diseases that are now vaccine-preventable.)
Vaccines in general cover a larger number of diseases BUT have fewer "triggers" in them. For example, the original vaccine, smallpox, basically had to give you the whole disease to get your immune system going. Now we can separate out a few key proteins or antigens that are specific to the disease, rather than the hundreds that comprise it.
The upshot is, if you are in a risk category, get vaccinated. If you're not, practice good hygiene and wash your hands a lot, eat well, and get plenty of rest. And de-stress! Stressed people get sick easier.
Actually I am a lab rat in an elaborate plot to take over the world.
H1N1 does refer to proteins of the viral coat, but there is no inherent reason why we cannot mount an immune response to those proteins.
The flu is either incorrectly refered to as the "Swine Flu" or correctly refered to as the H1N1 flue. It is not refered to as the "Mexican Flu" by anyone other than yourself.
I have no idea what you mean by this:
there is some chance that the mantle of flu would be copied around the much more dangerous virus
But then again, it's obvious that neither do you. If you were capable of packaging the genes for an innocuous flu into the coat of a more virulent flu, it would only increase the chances of infection in the first generation, because the less virulent genes delivered into the infected cell would code for the more mundane viral coat, not the one it had hijacked, becuase it would lack the genes necessary for it's production you moron.
And as to the 1917 flu pandemic, it's not even remotely relevant. Medical science, both prevention as well as treatment of symptoms, has come so far as to make any comparisons nonsensical. For one thing, penecillin wasn't even mass produced until the 1940's. I am aware that the flu is a virus, and not effected by antibiotics, but the flu is also capable of lowering overall immune function such that a significant number of the deaths in the wake of the 1917 flu were as a result of secondary infections resulting from the primary flu infection. Also, the first antiviral drugs were developed in the 1960's so were unavailable in 1917 without a time machine.
Pneumonia is not a disease in and of itself you fuckwit. Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs that can be caused by any number of infectious agents, including bacteria. My wife's aunt has pneumonia and gave the infectious agent to my wife and daughter. They don't have pneumonia because the disease didn't settle in their lungs but in their sinuses. As a result they simply have head colds instead of the more serious pneumonia despite being infected by the same virus.
Please mister FUDster, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
The problem is that no human can develop an immune response to either H1 or N1 (as that would be deadly).
Um, what?
If a virus were to infect a cell, and the mexican flu would infect the same cell, there is some chance that the mantle of flu would be copied around the much more dangerous virus, which would beat any immunity or vaccine we currently have, would react differently to most treatments and be capable of spreading through open air (through coughing).
If such an event were to take place, that event has a good chance of making the 1917 flu pandemic look like a tiny issue. That disease literally blocked the world economy for over 2 months, making millions of victims.
The problem is not the flu in the H1N1 form. The problem is that pneumonia might "be infected" and transform into an H1N1 virus. The problem is, in essence, the evolution that it might cause in other viruses. Cases of gene transfer between viruses are well-studied, and the current consensus is that it's commonplace.
No, actually the PROBLEM is that such drivel got marked "Informative" on slashdot...
Seriously?
I have to say that after college, medical school, graduate school, and over 12 years of virology and immunology research, I've read a lot of stuff (including popular science that was meant to be educational) that was ridiculous. But the above post ranks in my top 5 examples of manic garbage. It's a collection of bits and pieces of something you've overheard, put together somewhat like a neanderthal would try to piece together the space shuttle. It may contain a couple of the correct parts, but the result does not only fail to take off, but is not identifiable as the correct object, no matter from what angle you look at it.
Rubbish. Society has a significant interest in what you do with your body, because the results of that action may cause harm to others. If, for example, you have extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, you can expect public health authorities to hold you in isolation, and if necessary, force treatment upon you.
An individual's ignorance should not be to society's detriment. If their ignorance or lack of compliance will cause harm to others, they may be forced to comply with procedures, even when those procedures cause them discomfort, inconvenience, or possible harm.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
The CDC's 2009 H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu) site is handsomely designed and rich in resources for all ages and interests.
The geek will find public health spreadsheet simulations for Windows and Excel here: H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu): Preparedness Tools for Professionals
Interesting stuff, no specialist knowledge or skills required.
Social networking and mobile resources, widgets, buttons and badages: Social Media - Novel H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu