Boston Declares Health Emergency Due To Massive Flu Outbreak

skade88 writes "Boston has seen 10 times more flu cases this year than last. They are now up to 700 cases and counting, with 18 deaths in the city. The city of Boston has declared a public health emergency in the wake of the epidemic. 'The CDC said the proportion of people visiting health care providers with flu-like symptoms climbed from 2.8 percent to 5.6 percent in four weeks. By contrast, the rate peaked at only 2.2 percent during the relatively mild 2011-2012 flu season. The estimated rate of flu-related hospitalizations in the U.S. was 8.1 per 100,000 people, which is high for this time of year, according to Dr. Joe Bresee, chief of the epidemiology and prevention branch of the CDC’s influenza division. The agency’s next advisory will be issued Friday.' As previously discussed on Slashdot it would also be nice for your friends and coworkers for you to stay home if you are sick."

Comments

Good Advice

[masternerdguy]

Why do people wait for an epidemic to stay home when they are sick? If you are sick, don't go out! If you do, you are part of the problem.

Re:Good Advice

[SerpentMage]

Beep wrong answer in America...

Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave. Honestly, it is what it is, and this what Americans want. Hence this is what America gets.

Re:Good Advice

[masternerdguy]

I am an American. By the way, many companies will punish you for coming to work sick now, especially in retail and food service positions where you might infect the customers.

Re:Good Advice

[Bremic]

It's fairly simple. When employers insist that you need to go to a doctor when you are sick and get proof or they won't believe that you were, then people decide "if I have to go out anyway, I may as well go to work."
Also, when one person in an office is very sick, then they get a lot of negative attention. If it spreads and a number of people get sick, then they were one of the unlucky ones.

I used to stay home when sick, until I had a manager who told me that if I took any more time off I would probably lose my job. So when I next got the flu I took drugs and went to work. I can tell you though, I really enjoyed my lengthy closed door meeting with him and HR that day. I don't think they were happy I scheduled that meeting.

Re:Good Advice

[TubeSteak]

If you are sick, don't go out! If you do, you are part of the problem.

By the time you're sick (aka showing symptoms), you've already been infectious for at least a day.

The real solution is to get vaccinated and hope that the pharmaceutical companies guessed correctly about this year's strain.

Re:Good Advice

[SerpentMage]

"many" does not imply policy. I have American friends and lived there for a while. The problem is that folks want to earn a living and either they take it from their vacation (which people do not want to do) or they just come to work and hide it as best as they can.

I find your comment quite odd on how society deals with a problem. They punish, instead of just changing policy into a better policy. Either way there are society costs. At least with sick paid leave people will be assured that they can continue to earn a living.

Re:Good Advice

[Trepidity]

But by default you won't be paid if you stay home, so there's still an incentive to try to come in and hide it if you feel you're at all on the borderline, and to come back as soon as you no longer look visibly sick (even if you're still contagious).

Some employers do give their employees a certain number of sick days to reduce that incentive, but labor law in most states doesn't require it, and many employers don't. For example, neither Starbucks nor McDonald's offer sick days to their retail workers. Oddly, they do offer sick days to their non-retail workers (office employees, e.g. accountants, managers, etc.), despite those employees not being customer-facing. Perhaps they care about whether corporate HQ is sick more than whether customers get sick. :P

Re:Good Advice

[masternerdguy]

You act like everyone is really sick. Facts are there are morons who abuse the system because they don't want to go to work, and as a result everyone is punished for it. Those people force businesses to write Draconian sick day policies.

Re:Good Advice

[masternerdguy]

But you may still be infectious, best to limit exposure, even if you've already contaminated some people you can avoid contaminating others. Re-contamination is also a problem.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

I work from home and have no real world contact with the people I work just email and phone. Since I'm not going to give anything to my coworkers I have no problem working when I'm sick even though have paid sick leave to spare, besides if I take a day off I won't get that overtime pay.

Re:Good Advice

[Jetra]

They punish you if you take a sick day, they punish you if you come in sick. Do they expect you to be 100% until you're dead?

Re:Good Advice

[X0563511]

Yea, going to the doctor, waiting half an hour or more, spending at least at $30 copay (assuming you actually have insurance worth a damn) to be told "yep, you're sick" - sounds like a good idea...

Re:Good Advice

[sl4shd0rk]

and this what Americans want.

No, actually this isn't what Americans "want". The corporate policies pretty much force a take-it-or-leave-it policy. I think the last explanation I heard from HR when griping about benefits being cut (yet again) was "Be glad you have a job in this economy".

Re:Good Advice

[RearNakedChoke]

Even places that do have paid sick leave, its rationed. So I will make a decision, each time I'm sort of sick, whether or not its worth it to use one of my 5 sick days, or whether I think I'll get REALLY sick in the future and should save for that day.

Employers need to actively encourage/have contingency plans for sick people. Especially for office workers, to have a working telecommuting policy/system in place so that a person can not only easily work from home on a mildly sick day, but be encouraged to work from home and still be productive without infecting others.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't know anyone who works in the restaurant industry. Go ask any student waiting tables if they get to choose to come in or not (without losing their job at least). And for the ones who are not 'supposed to' come it, do you think they get paid to stay home? Given the choice between not paying rent at the end of the month and taking a handful of medication to get out bed and then sneezing in your food, they are going to sneeze in your food every time.

Re:Good Advice

[h4rr4r]

How are they forcing companies to do that?

I think you mean these companies like to use that as an excuse to save a couple bucks on what used to be a normal part of compensation. Everything will have some level of abuse, the ideal is to keep it to a minimum you will never not have it. It sure is a convenient excuse to screw the rest of the workers though.

Re:Good Advice

[superdave80]

Who pays for the doctor visit? Also I now have to drag myself to a doctor's office and wait for who knows how long, rather than resting in bed?

Re:Good Advice

[demonlapin]

Most American employees work for someone who offers sick leave. However, most larger organizations also charge the first day or two against personal leave (aka vacation) to prevent abuses. Often this day will be "refunded" if people get a doctor's excuse.

Re:Good Advice

[masternerdguy]

American insurance typically involves the patient paying part of the fee, usually 10-40 dollars depending on the service. It is to discourage us from going to the doctor when there's nothing wrong with us.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes. The "cutting off your nose to spite your face" reaction. Sorry, it's still stupid despite your attempt at defending it.

Re:Good Advice

[masternerdguy]

I forgot, all corporations are evil. Meanwhile in the real world people are calling in sick to go party, sleep in, or because they need more vacation time.

Re:Good Advice

[h4rr4r]

I never said such a thing.
Many corporations still offer this benefit.

Just your claims are mostly BS. Most people need the money too much to call in sick when sick or when they want to do something else.

Re:Good Advice

[bigstrat2003]

Yeah, that's real possible for those of us who live alone. We have to go out in order to do those fairly unimportant things like buying groceries, or medicine, or...

Re:Good Advice

[vlm]

I am an American

Are you sure?

By the way, many companies will punish you for coming to work sick now

That is easily the strangest thing I've ever heard. I've literally never heard of such a thing in all my decades.

I think we're more likely to see the Republicans convert en mass to Islam or we'll see Karl Marx carved into mt rushmore before any american company will try to increase sick days taken. Its just too easy of a metric to grade "resources" and their supervisors.

I really have to point out, that having had the actual real flu in the past, if you have it, you'll be so sick there is no way you'll make it to work unless you're Hercules himself. If you're physically able to go to work, trust me, its almost certain you just have a minor cold or a minor cough or at most a weak case of walking pneumonia. If your only symptom is you have a slightly stuffy nose, thats a cold, not the flu. When your fever is 103+ and you feel like you can barely get out of bed and you feel like you're about to cough out a lung, now thats the start of the flu.

Re:Good Advice

[Verteiron]

Don't forget incubating for 15+ minutes in a cramped room with a lot of other sick people, all coughing and sneezing. If you weren't sick when you arrived, you certainly will be when you leave.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly, they do offer sick days to their non-retail workers
Most places that are like that are lucky to get a full crew to come in on time... Remember they are paying the minimum they are required to by law. You get what you pay for.

My wife used to work at a place like that. She found out a few years ago from one of her old managers that she was on the top of the list of people to call when someone bailed. She went ballistic as she was called in pretty much every day that she was not scheduled to work. There is a reason you can pretty much get a job at mcdonalds. They have a huge turnover and many times a crew who doesnt want to bother to show up...

I am sure at one point they had sick days. Then it was probably abused up and down. So guess what?...

Re:Good Advice

[LurkerXXX]

The decision for what strains to use is not up to the pharmaceutical companies. It's up to each government to decide what to use in vaccines licensed in that country, based on recommendations from a group of the five World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centers for Reference and Research on Influenza. One of which is the CDC in the U.S.

In the U.S., the decision is then made by the FDA based on the CDC/WHO recommendations.

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/vaccination/virusqa.htm

Re:Good Advice

[assertation]

Why do people wait for an epidemic to stay home when they are sick? If you are sick, don't go out! If you do, you are part of the problem.

In the United States many people have jobs without paid sick leave or very SMALL alotments of sick leave that are quickly used up.

You don't show up for work, you get paid less and you may not have enough money to cover everything you hoped to cover.

That is why.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. That is the very definition of a good taxpayer.

Re:Good Advice

[geminidomino]

And those "draconian sick day policies" force sick workers to come in sick and risk infecting others.

The morons writing the policies because of the morons abusing it bred the coil.

Re:Good Advice

[h4rr4r]

Yeah, as someone who had the real flu a few years ago I agree. The best description I ever heard was "The first few days I was afraid it would kill me, after that I was afraid it would not."

Re:Good Advice

[vlm]

It is to discourage us from going to the doctor when there's nothing wrong with us.

You know, like when you're home sick with a cold or the flu.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes, the doctor's note. Well isn't THAT just a wonderful thing to go get. Let's take a look at my options:

1. Lie in bed, eat some nyquil and chicken noodle soup, and sleep the sickness away to let your body heal.
2. Sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, surrounded by dozens of people sick with everything under the sun while you're immune system is compromised, only to have a doctor look at you for 3 seconds, tell you you have a cold or whatever, followed by paying $30 for the doctor's note. After that, I can go home after essentially putting in the equivelant hours of a full day's work surrounded by sick people, get nowhere even remotely close to enough sleep and rest to heal, and be 10 times as sick due to the dozen other things I caught.

Yeah, option 2 sounds awesome, thanks workplace.

Re:Good Advice

[Quiet_Desperation]

My employer here in California actively encourages people to stay home when sick. They recently did the move where personal time and sick time got combined, but they increased the accrual rates versus time served so it winds up pretty much the same as it was when it was Sick + Vacation. Some sort of tax thing, we figure.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

But you had to have! Disagreeing with corporate policies means you're a communist!

Re:Good Advice

[Quiet_Desperation]

Got a cite or a link? Is this a survey of formal policies, or just a set of asshole bosses?

Re:Good Advice

[h4rr4r]

So they got rid of them as a cost saving measure?

They could solve this problem, but it would require sick leave and a pay level higher than minimum wage. Why would someone worry about keeping a job that pays that little? Not like there is any risk of not finding another one.

Re:Good Advice

[CanHasDIY]

I forgot, all corporations are evil. Meanwhile in the real world people are calling in sick to go party, sleep in, or because they need more vacation time.

Anecdotes:

They do not equal evidence.

To quote the meme, pics or it didn't happen.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Hence this is what America gets.

A couple days of 'head cold' with a fever about once a year. The human condition, in other words.

This Annual CDC+media fueled flu hysteria is a recent innovation. The fact that so many deluded fools think this a matter of public policy and some great failing that it hasn't been fixed yet is the only actual problem here.

Life, people. It isn't perfect. Please stop indulging rage and hate because it isn't perfect.

Re:Good Advice

[Desler]

You mean half a day, right?

Re:Good Advice

[Kittenman]

Who pays for the doctor visit? Also I now have to drag myself to a doctor's office and wait for who knows how long, rather than resting in bed?

Damn right - I self-diagnose myself over the internet. (Resting in bed right now with a bad case of leprosy compounded by Muelenbach syndrome. Don't worry though - I'll be fine on Monday).

Re:Good Advice

[gv250]

Most American employees work for someone who offers sick leave.

I used to believe that. However, I've recently worked for two fortune-100 companies, and one startup spun off from one of them. In each of these companies, leave is called "PTO" or "paid time off." The idea is that you have a single account for earned time off -- you use it whether you are sick or on vacation. In essence, you are required to use vacation days for *every* sick day.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay home while sick... rofl. not in this country.
In the usa you don't even stay home DURING an epidemic.
If you don't work you don't get paid.
And are likely to be fired or laid off. Oh sure they won't come right out and say it was because you took 3 days off to barf your guts up.
No.. You'll be fired for something that can't be proven either way. Something like 'not a team player'.

99% of the times i've ever been sick it was because some coworker came to work while sick and infected the rest of us.

You are a 100% completely replaceable drone (even when you're not)
And now with our shit economy. It's even more true. There's 200 people standing in line to take your job if you fuckup in the tiniest way possible.

Oh what? Don't work for such a crappy employer? Well guess what. The vast majority of them are like that now. And getting worse.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

#tinfoilHat #releasedStrains

Good thing we've got ObamaCare

Re:Good Advice

[CanHasDIY]

Yes. That is the very definition of a good serf.

FTFY.

Re:Good Advice

[Archangel Michael]

Cough ... "I"m not feeling well" happens to fall on first day of Duck Season (or big game day, or round of golf)

I get sick days, paid. But I know people that take all of their sick days for whatever reason and then when they DO get sick, don't have any and end up whining about not having enough sick days. Dude you went duck hunting (sick day) and got sick now that you're out of sick days ... I have no sympathy.

On the other hand, don't get the flu, it sucks. And all those flu vaccines aren't helping.

http://prn.fm/2013/01/08/gary-null-flu-vaccine/#axzz2HWMRMGv4

Re:Good Advice

[blind biker]

Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave. Honestly, it is what it is, and this what Americans want. Hence this is what America gets.

Honestly, Americans "want" a whole lot more of fucked up stuff, like a dysfunctional healthcare system that does not cover 50 million of its citizens and it's still expensive.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

a crew who doesn't want to bother to show up...

Would you care about showing up to a shit job with no advancement? There's no concept of a career here or any sense of loyalty from the corporation. I'd say McDonalds is as uncaring and apathetic to their employees as the minimum wage employees are to McDonalds.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

I get a whopping five days per year of "vacation" time, which I have to use towards any sick days or appointments. When I had the flu last week, I came back to work as soon as I was able to make it through a day, instead of waiting until I felt I was 100% back to normal (would have taken an extra three days if I'd done the latter). But I can't afford three unpaid days (used up the last of my vacation on the days I did take).

Re:Good Advice

[Quiet_Desperation]

Ever put the Nyquil *in* the chicken soup? Yeah, bad fevers make the most horrid ideas seem like bright and shiny inventive genius. :-)

Re:Good Advice

[Princeofcups]

Some employers do give their employees a certain number of sick days to reduce that incentive, but labor law in most states doesn't require it, and many employers don't.

The worse place I worked at thought they'd be smart and reward people who stay healthy by combining 2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick time into 4 weeks of combined sick and vacation time. Instead, people scheduled 4 weeks of vacation at the beginning of the year, and they all had to come in even when violently sick so as to not use up their "vacation" time. You would not believe the amount of wheezing and coughing on a daily basis.

Re:Good Advice

[Desler]

The plural of anecdote is not evidence. Provide some actual evidence that more than a tiny minority of workers actually do this. I won't hold my breath.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

I was told to come in, despite having a fever, not being able to walk due to dizziness and coughing uncontrollably about every five seconds, day and night.
The quality of work I did that day does not bear the light of day.

You don't say "screw that, I'm sick" to your boss when you live in a right-to-fire state. They can wait a week, fire you without giving a reason, and you have no recourse.

Re:Good Advice

[Phrogman]

But in CorporationLand, the important thing is to maximize the profits at all costs. The best way to maximize those profits is to pay the minimum possible wage with zero benefits - and if the person doesn't show up enough times, hire another desperate drone from the huddled masses of the unemployed and abuse them until they leave or find a better job. You get what you hire of course, but since its for a job that has no future and is simple enough to learn, they don't have to have high standards.
Sure, if they paid a better wage and offered decent benefits they would retain more employees and have more loyal workers but suspect the current system is working better for them.
Where I am living the minimum wage is $8.75/hr I believe. A study from a year or two ago determined that you need to be making at least $15/hr in order to have an acceptable minimum standard of living in the same community. The average price of a house here is $603k. Thus, the average person will never own a house here and will be stuck renting. Since there are no rent controls, rent continues to climb while wages drop.

Re:Good Advice

[Catbeller]

It's not even in effect yet, FoxNewsboy.

Re:Good Advice

[blind biker]

It's fairly simple. When employers insist that you need to go to a doctor when you are sick and get proof or they won't believe that you were, then people decide "if I have to go out anyway, I may as well go to work."

This is solved fairly well in Finland, where you have health centers in every district, so it's never more than 400 m away from your home. Flu cases are handled by nurses instead of MDs, so "throughput" is high. If the nurse finds that you might have a secondary infection, or something other than a flu, you are "escalated" to an MD in the same building.

Re:Good Advice

[geekoid]

But I have a lot of anecdotes~

Re:Good Advice

[Beardo the Bearded]

Where my ex works, they had to get rid of sick days.

See, everyone got 10 sick days a year but they were bankable. So you had people coming in baked out of their minds on cold meds getting everyone else sick and banking the time to use as extra vacation time.

What they ended up doing was giving everyone unlimited sick days that switch to STD once you go 30 days in a row. Abusers are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Re:Good Advice

[niado]

The plural of anecdote is not evidence. Provide some actual evidence that more than a tiny minority of workers actually do this. I won't hold my breath.

I can't find much statistical data on this (the difficulty in conducting a study on these types of activities should be evident), but this Monster.com survey indicates 8% of workers call out "sick" at least twice per summer, "to enjoy the summer weather", while 11% do it about once per year. This is a pretty unrepresentative data point, but read into it what you wish.

Re:Good Advice

[Captain Splendid]

5 sick days? Jeeebus.

Granted, I'm a small business, but I'll give any employee whatever time they damn well need to not look like shit in my office and probably make the problem worse by infecting others.

Hell, even for lower grade stuff, I'd still rather you got some rest for a day or two instead a week spent int he office delivering subpar work.

It's more cost effective for me in the long run to provide sane sick leave instead squeezing the ju-uice. Being a boss with a shred of humanity is just icing on the cake.

Re:Good Advice

[dgatwood]

On the other hand, don't get the flu, it sucks. And all those flu vaccines aren't helping.

http://prn.fm/2013/01/08/gary-null-flu-vaccine/#axzz2HWMRMGv4 [prn.fm]

I'd be a lot more inclined to read the rest of the linked article if there weren't an egregious abuse of the apostrophe in the title....

Re:Good Advice

[DragonWriter]

The worse place I worked at thought they'd be smart and reward people who stay healthy by combining 2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick time into 4 weeks of combined sick and vacation time.

I've seen places try to be even "smarter" and combine 2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick time into 3 weeks of combined "annual leave" or "paid time off".

Re:Good Advice

[AaronW]

I ran into this too when I went to work for a large networking company in Silicon Valley (competitor to Cisco). Anyway, after I joined I learned that they combined their sick leave and vacation pay and as it was the vacation was not all that generous. Of course the first thing that happens is I get the cold from hell. Next I find out that they have mandatory vacation days which were at odds with some trips I had planned and paid for long before I started working there (and told them about up front). Needless to say, I was happy to leave there over that and numerous other bonehead policies. They mandated that everyone take the week off of the 4th of July (3 days of vacation wasted) as well as the week of Labor Day (4 more days of vacation wasted).

Many other large companies also do not offer sick leave, even food chains like Red Lobster and Olive Garden.

Re:Good Advice

[geekoid]

Yes they do. we see every time. Make Accurate predictions based on how close it matches the virus. We can make predictions basde on uptake.
Any one who says the data doesn't support the vaccine is an idiot or a liar. That data is pretty well documented.

Is it perfect? no, it's not 100%, yet.

Gary NUll is an idiot. as an example:
"since the hype and subsequent fizzle of the H1N1 scare in 2008, "
Fizzle? mahny people died, hospitals around the coutry were running out of beds. They ONLY thiing that saved it from disaster was the distribtution and uptake of the vaccine.

But since disaster was averted, clearly is wasn't needs. That Gary Null's idiotic logic.

The post is full of out of context, and cherry picked data.

He is a SCAM idiot that has been cherry picking and lying about data and medicine for 40 years. And it's always been the same crap, never changing, never showing good data.
He does what he says others do, and he should be thrown in prison for malpractice, but since he is a SCAM practitioner, for some reason he is immune from liability when his advice kills people.

There are people dead from treatable disease because of this guy, and other selfish, and evil people like him.
And when I say evil I mean will take money from dying people for nonsense advice. Then the people die.
He preys on the vulnerable and naive.

He is an AIDS denialist.

Re:Good Advice

[s4ltyd0g]

While I agree with you, I'm not sure it works that way. You can be highly infectious even before the onset of symptoms.

regards

Re:Good Advice

[JustOK]

Sound like you have hypochondria. Take two placebos and call me maybe.

Re:Good Advice

[publiclurker]

The problem was that they let people bank sick days as vacation time. You need to keep them separate, (and then deal with abusers on a case by case basis). Otherwise, there is less incentive to stay at home when you are sick, since you can enjoy the time much better after it is converted into a vacation day.

Re:Good Advice

[Wookact]

When did we start using hash tags on Slashdot, and when did we start camel casing hash tags?

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem - Dr. Thomas Jefferson is a liar and should not be trusted to interpret all those "scientific" papers for anyone! A colleague of mine, Dr. John Adams read some of Dr. Jeffersons conclusions and found them to be totally hogwash. The soap study for example - first of all, all soap is "Anti-Bacterial" - it's soap! It's just how it works - it kills bacteria! - Secondly, only 15% of the households in Karachi, Pakistan even have running water. The infant mortality rate there is ten times what it is in the United States, sixty times what it is on the islands of Singapore, Iceland or Japan! You would have to be sick to think you could do believable illness studies about hand-washing in the middle of that place.

Re:Good Advice

[reboot246]

I'm an American, and I have plenty of sick leave. The problem is that when one has influenza, they don't feel like going out, but after three sick days we're REQUIRED to go see the doctor. Unless you live with a doctor, you can't comply with both.

Re:Good Advice

[Charliemopps]

Why do people wait for an epidemic to stay home when they are sick? If you are sick, don't go out! If you do, you are part of the problem.

Because you'd get fired. I would anyway. The only way to get a sick day in this country without pissing off your boss is to come in so sick at work that other people complain or you puke in the middle of the break room and your boss sends you home. I'm salaried, can work from home, and still am under pressure to come in at all costs. It's sad, but that's the way it works.

It used to be that you could get a doctors excuse and it was illegal for a boss to fire you because you had the excuse (at least in my state it was) Then came along HIPA and privacy concerns and it was suddenly illegal for the boss to take a doctors note. So now you can't prove you went to the doctor, and they cant ask you to. So as far as their concerned they just need to press you to come in as much as possible.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the franchises do pay more; it depends on how much business they do really. Not MccyDs but Taco Bell: I left the local Taco Bell express that I managed for a few years for one that was in a food court in a mall that was 45-50 minutes away. Even just being general help on the food lines / cashiers you got paid $16.75/hour.

They could ( and had to, otherwise no one would have stayed ) pay that much just because of the shear volume of business that the store did. Even during a "slow" hour we put out over 80-100 orders / hour.

Could they have paid shit wages like most fast food places did? Maybe, but they wouldn't have had a steady workforce that would stick with them. The shear volume that went through was the same as working at 2-3 other locations combined. Fortunately the owners / managers had been smart enough to see that paying employees well enough that they LIKED ( or at least tolerated coming in to work ) their job was better for the bottom line than being shorthanded. That and the shear volume meant they had been making money hand over fist anyways....

Re:Good Advice

[sphealey]

- - - - I find your comment quite odd on how society deals with a problem. They punish, instead of just changing policy into a better policy. - - - -

Large segments of US society don't believe that the situation you describe is bad policy, and a substantial percentage believe that even if it were punishment is good for the soul (literally and operationally). It is considered (by at least a plurality, if not a majority) a feature, not a bug. They want more of it too.

sPh

Re:Good Advice

[Archangel Michael]

17,000 deaths due to H1N1 (all time) is a lot of deaths. However more people die of Diabetes than Flu every year, yet we don't FORCE people to lose weight, while we DO force them to get injected with Mercury and other toxic chemicals.

Re:Good Advice

[boethius]

"Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave"

Really? I've been in the workplace for almost 20 years now and maybe one position of the many I've held over the years DIDN'T have paid sick leave. Of course I've generally been employed as a salaried employee where benefits packages tended to be pretty decent.

I suppose menial-type positions - Taco Bell, McDonald's, etc. - that don't offer much in the way of benefits may rarely offer paid sick leave.

Re:Good Advice

[Tagged_84]

Not true in Australia. Most full time jobs get around 10 days a year. That's enough for two servings of the flu with some change depending on how fast you recover. You can take two days off in a row without any medical certificate too.

Re:Good Advice

[happylight]

You just have to find a doctors office who would pay for this part (co-pay) out of their own pocket in order to get more business.

Very often you'll find these doctors in chinatown or a jewish neighborhood.

Re:Good Advice

[DigiShaman]

You know why don't you? Because management gets dibs on taking vacation during the periods of Thanks Giving, through the New Year. They talk amongst each other as to who gets what segments off for the week.

You got fucked. I can only conclude you were either not management, low in employment seniority (time with the company), or some combination of both.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better to not get the vaccine, since you're already infected. Won't fix you, sorry.

  I stopped getting flu shots a decade ago. Why? Every time I got the shot I got the flu. Now, it's 50-50. I get resp-sinus infections far more frequently than the flu. Which, while being asthmatic, is far more of a concern. Treatment? Occasionally a ZPAC which is no guarantee depending on if what I have is bacterial or viral.

Unless I feel like death, I'll head to work. Just load up on drugs, vitamins, water, and hot tea, and I'm off to work. And continue that list throughout the sickness.

Re:Good Advice

[The Archon V2.0]

I was once asked during a job interview how many sick days I expected to take in the next calendar year. That was quite the WTF. But hey, it was a call centre, what should one expect, regulatory compliance? HA!

Now I work at in a public-facing job that doesn't give me sick leave at all, but at least it's not a call centre.

Re:Good Advice

[xaxa]

It's even better in the UK, where for a small illness you can't be required to visit a doctor.

It's the first thing on the Government page about sick leave: https://www.gov.uk/taking-sick-leave "Employees only need a fit note from a doctor after 7 days off work sick and have the right to use their statutory holiday entitlement during their sickness."

Re:Good Advice

[radtea]

Any one who says the data doesn't support the vaccine is an idiot or a liar. That data is pretty well documented.

Nothing like adding a nice little anti-scientific ad hominem to your day.

The data are pretty well restricted to deaths from "flu and pneumonia", so no one actually has a clue what the death rate from influenza is, in the normal course of events. We have slightly better data on outbreak years, but from an overall public health perspective you'd think the CDC would actually have a reasonably good estimate of the total number of deaths prevented each year before recommending a universal vaccine that has about a 1 in a milliion rate of serious neurological complications (much worse in some years... now convince me that next year isn't going to be one of those years...)

There is an argument to be made for flu vaccines, but the case is no where near as open-and-shut as it is for smallpox and the like, and fleeing the realm of science to hurl insults is not a good way to resolve the issue.

Re:Good Advice

[cheesybagel]

Most forms of diabetes are not contagious. Same reason why you can drink alcohol but not smoke in a restaurant.

Re:Good Advice

[elucido]

If you are sick, don't go out! If you do, you are part of the problem.

By the time you're sick (aka showing symptoms), you've already been infectious for at least a day.

The real solution is to get vaccinated and hope that the pharmaceutical companies guessed correctly about this year's strain.

But those vaccines aren't healthy. How many vaccines can you take before the vaccines present side effects?

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

And, the reference hyperlinks are to the C drive

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

11% and 8% are minorities... one might call them tiny minorities.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Then increase vacation time and/or have a company holiday on that day. The increase in moral will more than offset the lost of one day. People at the company are already looking for reasons to skip work, so they aren't too happy being there.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

If lots of employees are taking sick leave all the time, something is wrong with the company. It's hiring the wrong people or having the wrong culture or it has a unhealthy working environment...

Punish the morons who abuse it, not everyone. If the Boss and managers can't figure out who are the morons, then that's the main problem.

If you're working in a company that doesn't give paid sick leave, the next time you have a nasty flu or "norovirus", go shake your boss's hand or leave your germs on door handles he uses.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

It's what cheap labor conservatives want. The rest of us, not so much.

Re:Good Advice

[Shados]

Thats the worse system. Then people come in sick just so they can have longer vacations.

Where i work (in Boston too, woo!), sick days are simply not tracked as long as its not obvious you're abusing them, and even then the "official" rule is really lax (you only need a note after 7 business days, and again, only if people suspect you're abusing....and you can work from home at which point that doesn't even count as sick days...)

If you're sick and dare step a foot in the office (if you're just sniffling, you can work from home instead of spreading it, even if you feel mostly ok, you're still contagious), you will get asked to go back.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

At the same time, many/most won't pay you when you don't come in, and if you don't come in too often, they'll fire you.

So not only do you have to go in while sick, you have to hide it. Kinda like animals in the wild hide illness so predators around them don't cach on that they're vulnerable.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

And there you have it, the actual solution to the problem. That's why it's safe to say that companies that don't offer sick days at all are just lying when they blame abuses.

Re:Good Advice

[TheLink]

Big deal, the Germans get 4-5 weeks of paid vacation (4 weeks minimum by law). Their economy seems to be doing OK despite that. In Denmark it's 25 days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country

The US employer style seems to be burn out your employees, then discard them. Might work fine for low end jobs that require little training and investment. It may well be that most of these low training low end jobs will be taken over by robots and other automation in the future.

Whatever it is, not having paid sick leave is a big health issue. If more people quarantined themselves when diseases made them feel miserable and reduced the spreading of those diseases, that would make those diseases less likely to make people so miserable, whether because they spread less, or because they evolve to be less nasty.

Re:Good Advice

[tompaulco]

Where my ex works, they had to get rid of sick days. See, everyone got 10 sick days a year but they were bankable. So you had people coming in baked out of their minds on cold meds getting everyone else sick and banking the time to use as extra vacation time.
They just did the opposite where I work. We had two weeks of paid vacation per year and if you were sick, you were sick, and anybody abusing that got dealt with on a case by case basis. Now, they have changed to you have two weeks of paid time off per year period, including vacation and sick time. So, obviously the upshot of that is that people are going to come to work when they are sick so they don't lose their vacation time.
They even managed to try to spin it like this conversion from two weeks plus sick days to two weeks minus sick days was somehow a good thing.

Re:Good Advice

[tompaulco]

Interesting that the competitor to Cisco did that. Apparently Cisco has also screwed people over on vacation time, shutting down at the end of the year and forcing people to take vacation time or go unpaid for several days.

Re:Good Advice

[TheLink]

Maybe you're infectious a day before the symptoms show. But after the symptoms show, you're sneezing and blasting billions of viruses everywhere. That definitely makes a big difference in how infectious you are.

If EVERYONE quarantined themselves strictly (no contact) when they started massive sneezing, puking, crapping etc, until they got better; more of these diseases would have to evolve to be less obvious and possibly less nasty. Won't significantly affect those that have many nonhuman hosts, but the rest might be. Not ever going to happen of course, but just a thought :).

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

"...indicates 8% of workers call out "sick" at least twice per summer, "to enjoy the summer weather"

We here in civilized countries have 5 weeks vacation, that allows for 3 weeks in summer a week in spring and one for the end of the year.
We also can have as many sick days as we want and the economy doesn't collapse because of it.
If you suspect somebody is simulating, just send him to the control doc or hire a detective.

Re:Good Advice

[tompaulco]

I've seen places try to be even "smarter" and combine 2 weeks vacation and 2 weeks sick time into 3 weeks of combined "annual leave" or "paid time off".
As mentioned above, my company recently combined 2 weeks of vacation and however much sick time you need in to 2 weeks of "paid time off". They also at the same time discarded all of my unused vacation time over the last 6 years. With my seniority, I now get 4 weeks of vacation a year, but there is no possible way to take it with all of the project deadlines and they would be pissed if I took a vacation right in the middle of a big project (and we are always in the middle of a big project). They also decided that when you quit or get fired they will only pay half of your "Paid time off" since they still try to make a distinction between sick leave and vacation when it is in their favor to do so.
Several copies of the paperwork have been dropped on my desk to sign over the last several weeks, and none of them have gotten signed yet. I'm trying to think of the correct wording to add into the contract.

Re:Good Advice

[tompaulco]

I have never had the real flue and I try to point out to the hundreds and hundreds of people I meet every year who think that they have the flu that if they really had the flu, there is a 1 in 5 chance they'd be dead right now. Somehow, none of the hundreds of people I know who think they had the flu ever died from it.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

"I was told to come in, despite having a fever, not being able to walk due to dizziness and coughing uncontrollably about every five seconds, day and night.
The quality of work I did that day does not bear the light of day."

I hope sniffling, coughing and licking the bosses door handle was included in that work. Also when he's out, you can infect his pens, his phone and sneeze a few times on his keyboard.

Re:Good Advice

[nospam007]

"I used to stay home when sick, until I had a manager who told me that if I took any more time off I would probably lose my job. So when I next got the flu I took drugs and went to work."

Just getting a fucking flu-shot didn't cross your mind?
Is that you, Jenny?

Re:Good Advice

[tompaulco]

I took some sick time off this week because I was feeling too woozy and lightheaded to drive. Turns out some people made some bad decisions on products that I am ultimately responsible for while I was away and I didn't find out about it until I got back. Seems I can't leave the company for a day or two without people screwing things up. Even though I spent at least half the day online working from home, nobody thought to solicit my advice on what to do in areas which were clearly my responsibility.

Re:Good Advice

[tompaulco]

I got a flu shot once and got sicker than a dog afterwards. I don't know if I had the flu. My understanding is likely not because the flu is fairly often fatal. But just to be safe, I haven't had a flu shot since.

Re:Good Advice

[blind biker]

Well, that's nice, but we were talking about flu, and that's not "small illness". Flu is a killer.

Re:Good Advice

[Bremic]

I have been getting flu-shots every year for over 10 years now. I have also been in the workforce for over 20 years, and I don't remember hearing about them much when I started working.
Since getting the shots, I have had the flu twice; in the years previous I got them every couple of years.
Just because something is common now, doesn't mean they were common always.

Re:Good Advice

[Doctor_Jest]

Technically influenza isn't the killer, secondary respiratory infections (pneumonia) are the killers. Influenza just holds your head under the water until the bubbles stop. :)

The 1918 pandemic killed people (otherwise robustly healthy people) via secondary infections. In 1957, there was a bigger outbreak (sickened more people than the 1918 pandemic IIRC) but since there was more antibiotics available to treat the bacterial secondary infections, there were fewer deaths. These days, the flu kills the already weakened and elderly (or the very young) far more than the average schmo.

That being said, I often wonder if we see another "new" mutation of influenza if it will be as devastating as 1918... One that we as a species have never seen, so it comes on us in full force, I mean.

Either way, I got 6 weeks of PTO that I can start taking January 1st... so I'm covered if I get the flu. I loathe people who store up their PTO (you only get to roll over a week each year)....

Re:Good Advice

[Doctor_Jest]

You most likely didn't get the flu. You probably got flu-like symptoms... they vary in severity from mild to fairly bad (aches, mild to moderate fever, headache, fatigue, etc), but only last a day or two. That's your immune system "getting to know" the virus and incorporating it into its fighting regimen. You cannot get the flu from the injected vaccines (it's dead), and only a slight risk using Tamiflu (since it is still a live culture in that vaccine, but it is very weak.)

Are you allergic to egg products? That might be why you got sick... try Tamiflu next time. Trying to rely on herd immunity in this "autism was caused by vaccines" world we live in is more of a crapshoot than it used to be.

What's fatal about the flu (that I've said earlier in the thread) is the secondary infections (pneumonia etc) that can accompany the flu. Go see a doctor to be sure, and you will most likely survive the flu, unless you're an unlucky bastard God has it in for... :)

Re:Good Advice

[Doctor_Jest]

What side effects? And how is the influenza vaccine "not healthy"? You're not one of those "autism from vaccines" followers of Jenny McCarthy are you?

Re:Good Advice

[rjstanford]

You need to find a new doctor - an actual GP who you go to see for well-checks as well as when you're sick, rather than a doc-in-the-box clinic. Then 5-15 minutes should be much more like it.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

You misunderstand, they don't offer any sick PAY to go with that sick day.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

Best answer, go to work. NEED a quick meeting with several managers. Be sure to cough and sneeze a LOT and ALMOST cover your mouth and nose in time.

Re:Good Advice

[AaronW]

It was a combination of both. I'm glad I don't work there anymore... they've had a lot of layoffs since then. What pissed me off the most is that they were not up front about that. All of the other companies I've worked for had sane policies.

Re:Good Advice

[CptNerd]

One time with the flu I drank a NyQuil capful of chicken soup and a bowlful of NyQuil. Fun times. The taste, though, the taste still haunts me...

Re:Good Advice

[Dahan]

and only a slight risk using Tamiflu (since it is still a live culture in that vaccine, but it is very weak.)

Tamiflu is an antiviral drug, not a vaccine, and is not made from the flu virus. For some reason, Wikipedia lists six different ways to synthesize Tamiflu, and as you can see, it's just regular organic chem stuff.

Re:Good Advice

[sFurbo]

from Wikipedia:

The case fatality rate for the Spanish (1918) flu was >2.5%,[1] about 0.1% for the Asian (1956-58) and Hong Kong (1968-69) flus,[2] and

This is nowhere near 20%. Or did you mean people who got it every year? They would still need to get it for may years for the aggregate rate to be 20%. The rate of course depends on the age of the person. Old people who get it every year might quickly get to 20%.

Re:Good Advice

[Mean Variance]

My employer, a Silicon Valley financial technology company, has had a simple PTO policy that treats a missed day as a missed day from the day it started in the 90's. You get 20 days a year. After 5 years, 25; after 9 years capped at 30, where I am.

Over the years various benefits have come, gone, come back (e.g., 401k match). But that one policy has never changed because everyone likes it. You can bank up to 240 hours but that caps so everyone is supposed to take time off. (Of course, there are always the workaholics who max out and just keep working. But most make reasonable use, especially given than half of the engineers are H1B or green card. They like to take 3-5 weeks at a time.)

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

This is solved fairly well in Finland, where you have health centers in every district, so it's never more than 400 m away from your home.

That's quite a bit exaggerated statement. I live in Finland, in the second largest city, even. My nearest health center is 1.5 km away. It was also the nearest health center back when I lived in my previous place that was about 4 km away from it.

In the rural areas there are places where there is far more than 400 meters between two adjacent houses. There are places from where there's several dozens of kms to the closest health centers.

Re:Good Advice

[mellyra]

You act like everyone is really sick. Facts are there are morons who abuse the system because they don't want to go to work, and as a result everyone is punished for it. Those people force businesses to write Draconian sick day policies.

In Germany the employee has to provide his employer with a medical certification (confirming his illness) if he is on sick leave for more than three days.

However, the employer has the right to demand the certification earlier if he desires to do so and if the employment contract doesn't say otherwise (he can apply this right in a discriminatory fashion - e.g. demanding a medical certification on the first day only from employees whom he suspects of faking illness - as the Federal Labor Court recently found).

If the employer suspects that the medical certification provided by the employee is unreliable (maybe the doctor is very quick to certify illness without considering the possibility of a malingerer) he can demand a certification issued from a doctor appointed by the MDK (medical service of the health insurance, an official state-level institution that provides medical consulting to all health insurance companies) - these doctors have a strong reputation for not being deceived easily.

If the illness might impact the ways in which the employee can be used after his return to work the company physician has to issue a medical certificate.

All being said and done the average German employee still took 9.5 days of sick leave last year.

Re:Good Advice

[TyFoN]

Easy.
Just require a doctor notice for paid sick leave. If you don't have that, deduct the salary.

Re:Good Advice

[Coisiche]

In Britain I've heard it described in terms of the £20 note test...

If you see a £20 note at the other end of the room and can go and pick it up then you don't have flu. If you have flu then you couldn't manage.

Only had it once myself. In 2003 or 2004, I think, and would agree with that assessment.

Re:Good Advice

[Mysticalfruit]

I work in Boston for a company that has paid sick leave. We currently have lots and lots of people home sick with the flu. I was there last week. Our company policy is very clear, If you're sick, stay home and get healthy. If you're sitting at your desk with a fever and chills you're productivity is going to be practically zero.

Yeah, there are some companies in the US that have sweat shop like policies regarding sick leave, etc. However, in a place like Boston, I think those companies are in the minority. I'm sure there are people who milk the system, but honestly my company works to make our environment so enjoyable that going to work is fun and rewarding.

Please don't paint all American companies with the brush of stink.

Re:Good Advice

[3.5 stripes]

Sheer, shear is a noun or a verb meaning large scissors, or the act of using large scissors on an object, usually to remove hair or fur or wool, etc.

Re:Good Advice

[Doctor_Jest]

You're right, I forget the name of it... I got my brands mixed up. There is a flu vaccine that you inject nasally that has live culture of the flu virus, though it is weakened. It was for people who are too wimpy for needles. :)

Too many silly names for things these days.

Re:Good Advice

[tgd]

You act like everyone is really sick. Facts are there are morons who abuse the system because they don't want to go to work, and as a result everyone is punished for it. Those people force businesses to write Draconian sick day policies.

That's an easy fix -- you fire the abusers. I've done it before, and I'll do it again I'm sure.

I've found firing people who abuse the system tends to help morale quite a bit in an organization. Highly encouraged.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people wait for an epidemic to stay home when they are sick? If you are sick, don't go out! If you do, you are part of the problem.

In the United States many people have jobs without paid sick leave or very SMALL alotments of sick leave that are quickly used up.

You don't show up for work, you get paid less and you may not have enough money to cover everything you hoped to cover.

That is why.

Ah, an easy fix then.
If the entire first world can manage giving their employees paid sick leave, the U.S. could surely manage the same no?
It reminds of some program I watched long ago, same employer same job same qualifications for people, those in the U.S. got no sick leave, very limited holidays and a bunch of other bad conditions, those in Europe had paid sick leave, much more vacation, better benefits etc...
Before you go capitalism or free market on me. It was a U.S. company that decided it would be beneficial to set up shop in Europe and employ people there under those much better working conditions.

Re:Good Advice

[TapeCutter]

Yeah right, civilization will collapse if those burgers aren't flipped. God forbid anyone take a day off from the rat race to ENJOY themselves.

Re:Good Advice

[Whorhay]

I always hated the way the air force handled sick days. If you thought you were sick you had to show up to the clinic at or before the start of the normal workday in uniform. Eventually you would get to see a practitioner of one variety or another who would then prescribe horse pills of motrin and send you to work. In the very rare case that you had something serious, like maybe ebola, they would put you on quarters which meant you didn't have to go back to work. In six years the only time I was put on quarters was when I had my wisdom teeth pulled and was given a pain killer that kept me pretty light headed.

Re:Good Advice

[vlpronj]

No surprise that Red Lobster and Olive Garden don't offer it, at least to hourly restaurant staff. When companies make prominent lists because of being lousy employers, there's probably more than one reason. Low pay, lousy benefits, the-employee-is-always-wrong mentality, etc. http://247wallst.com/2012/11/21/the-12-companies-paying-americans-the-least/2/

Re:Good Advice

[pnutjam]

It pisses me off when people demand doc notes. How is a doctor going to help me with a cough I don't want to spread or a 24 hour stomach bug.

In the US, it also costs me around $20 out of pocket with good insurance. Otherwise it might be $100, just to get a note.

Re:Good Advice

[pnutjam]

Helps morale and improves the company culture at the same time!

Re:Good Advice

[pnutjam]

My last company included sick, vacation, and HOLIDAYS in your pto balance. It was a decent amount, not stingy, but it was still a pain to track things and make sure you had enough PTO for your xmas holiday or 4th of July. To be fair they used a bi-weekly accrual method and they appeared to let you borrow from your future accruals for holidays.

Now I work for a small city and get sick and vacation rolled together, again a decent amount that is not stingy nor too generous. They count holidays separately and although the total time off is the same it feels so much nicer not to have to worry about holidays. 37.5 hour workdays are nice too.

Re:Good Advice

[Farmer Pete]

Beep wrong answer in America...

Most workplaces don't have paid sick leave. Honestly, it is what it is, and this what Americans want. Hence this is what America gets.

I call bull. Please provide citation. The first numbers I got when I Googled it show that 75% of full time workers have sick days. Most part time workers don't get sick days, but then I can't say I really disagree with that. Those numbers are from The Center For American Progress, which is a very liberal organization. In other words, if they are reporting that 75% of full time workers get paid sick time, it's very likely that the number is actually significantly higher than that.

At my last job, we didn't get sick days. If we were sick, we didn't go to work, and we still got paid. We just didn't have any given number of days. Of course, if they noticed that you were abusing the system, they may ask you to start bringing in Doctors notes.

Re:Good Advice

[Farmer Pete]

Here is my real life experiences. I'm currently working for state government. We get 13 sick days a year (4hrs a pay period), and we can bank those indefinitely. It's not uncommon for people to have +1000 hours of banked sick time, accumulated over +15 years of service. I'm constantly hearing coworkers making sarcastic comments to other coworkers about how they're not feeling well, and they probably wont be in tomorrow. Comments are complete with fake coughs. These same people are getting +4 weeks of vacation a year, but what's the point in having 1000 hours of sick time if you can't use it? So that's my public sector experience. My private sector experience started with getting 4 sick days a year (.333 days a month). Then, after getting a few promotions, my sick time was removed, and I was switched to a system where I had basically unlimited sick days, within reason. There was more or less an unspoken rule that if you used more than 6 days a year, they would start asking questions. Of course, if you had to be out for 2 weeks after a surgery, they would allow that with no questions asked.
In both situations, I don't feel like the company was evil. I feel like the State is waaayyy to giving, and with my private company, sick time (or lack thereof) was never an issue for me in the 7 years I worked there. It wasn't even an issue when I only had 4 sick days a year.

Re:Good Advice

[painandgreed]

I am an American. By the way, many companies will punish you for coming to work sick now, especially in retail and food service positions where you might infect the customers.

Yes, but they punish you more if you don't come in sick.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

They ONLY thiing that saved it from disaster was the distribtution and uptake of the vaccine.

Bullshit. It took many months for a vaccine for that strain to become available, and even longer for adequate quantities to be produced. The disaster was averted by H1N1 not being as infectious as feared and not by a vaccine that was available far too late to prevent a disaster. The only hope for the vaccine was to mitigate the damage if the outbreak had been worse.

Re:Good Advice

[Herr Brush]

This gets modded insightful? Who waits 6 hours to see a GP? You don't go to emergency to get a sick note.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you'll give them the time off, but will you pay them for it?

Re:Good Advice

[Captain Splendid]

Someone doesn't understand the concept of sick days.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

As the parent of more of those Boston statistics:
- We . are one confirmed case but the whole family has it. The doctors say it isn't even worth doing the screen.
- I have already used most of my allowed sick days for 2013
- I haven' t gotten hit yet but it' s almost guaranteed.

Therefore I will be coming to work sick as long as I feel safe to drive. Sorry but I have no choice.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Good advice: wash hands frequently, wear a mask, optimize vitamin D3 blood levels. The seasonal flu vaccine does not work as advertised and is only marginally useful. Please read these and keep in mind these people are not anti-vax and have a high opinion of most vaccines but not the seasonal flu one.

- Cochrane Review - Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults-

- Dr Lisa Jackson's out of season influenza vaccine research
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/2/337.short

- Dr. Tomljenovic's paper on problems with vaccines in the UK
http://www.ecomed.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/3-tomljenovic.pdf

If you have information that they missed I'm sure they would love to hear from you. Sorry but your belief in the effectiveness of the seasonal flu vaccine does not make it so.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

You can look up your own area but in Alberta, Canada we had less than 1/4 the deaths from H1N1 (78) in 2008 than we do on average from the seasonal flu (300+). Sorry but "fizzle" is completely appropriate term for the hype and results of the H1N1 2008 situation.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you hiring? Can I come work for you? I'll telecommute if necessary. You sound like a good boss. Need a Sysadmin with 17 years experience (Windows/Linux/OSX)?

Re:Good Advice

[WildBlueYonder]

American insurance typically involves the patient paying part of the fee, usually 10-40 dollars depending on the service. It is to discourage us from going to the doctor when there's nothing wrong with us.

Yep. What foreigners don't realize is that taking time out of your day to go hang out in a waiting room and then sit uncomfortably and be poked and prodded is one of our favorite American activities. Videogames? Football? Baseball? Concerts? Sex? None compare to the joy of a visit to the Doctor. If our healthcare system didn't force us to pay admission for the pleasure I don't think any of us would ever do anything else.

Re:Good Advice

[LurkerXXX]

Wow, talk about not undestanding anything about biology.

What do you think vaccines are? They are just bits of protiens that are identical to what some viruses or bacteria make that you are being exposed to so that you will develop and immune response against them. Do you know how many viruses and bacteria you are exposed to the protiens of daily? Millions and Millions.

Having vaccines aren't going to give you any side effects other than what you'd have if you jabbed yourself in the arm an equivilent number of times with an empty needle. Unless you have egg allergies, it's just not a concern.

Re:Good Advice

[Archangel Michael]

what is the actual solution to the problem? the "I'm all out of sick days because I used them up fraudulently" problem? Because there is no solution because enough people with that problem start whining about how "unfair" and "racist" and "homophobic" or whatever is the hot button term for taking a rational discussion and turning into a debate about code words for "I'm a whiner and losing on the merits of my argument".

It is really bad and the left wing WAY over uses these "hot button terms" to the point where they are meaningless for normal people. Take for instance the ESPN commentator who blamed the "Tea Party" for the fact that nobody go elected to the hall of fame this year. WTF???. And worse, nobody called him on it.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

Whining is just whining. Don't offer any sick leave and they'll whine about that too using the same hot button words, so what?

Send them home and dock their pay if they're out of sick days. Consider allowing the absence paid if there is good reason to believe they were actually sick on the other occasions they took sick days (even when someone has basically recovered, you can often tell that they were sick, OTOH if they come in after with a bit of a sunburn talking about how many ducks they shot or how they sank that tough putt....).

I have no idea what any of this has to do with the left.

Re:Good Advice

[Archangel Michael]

It is the left that is a softy to a good sob story.

Re:Good Advice

[sjames]

Left and right are much alike, it's just which sob stories and who tells them.

Re:Good Advice

[strikethree]

The US employer style seems to be burn out your employees, then discard them. Might work fine for low end jobs that require little training and investment. It may well be that most of these low training low end jobs will be taken over by robots and other automation in the future.

All jobs in America except management jobs and artistic jobs are low end jobs that pay meager wages. Everyone not doing one of those two jobs is easily replaceable and unimportant... well, except doctor and lawyer and even those guys are easily replaceable as long as they are not running their own practice.

Re:Good Advice

[Anonymous Coward]

H1N1 epidemic?? What planet are you from and currently residing on? There was no such thing. It turned out to be a con to bilk governments out of billions. The UK spent a good chunk of their entire budget on useless Tamiflu that caused more trouble than the H1N1 itself. Stick with the facts if you want to make a point. Sheesh. Idiot.

Re:Good Advice

[blind biker]

Right, secondary pulmonar infections are what causes deaths (unless it's a viral pneumonia, in which case the flu virus did it all by itself).

If you're still reading this: what is PTO?

Re:Good Advice

[xaxa]

If you're still reading this: what is PTO?

Paid time off.

I don't know where Doctor_Jest is from, but in the UK it's the general term encompassing all kinds of paid leave from work -- holiday, sick leave, parental/adoption leave, certain union related activities, etc.

Either way, I got 6 weeks of PTO that I can start taking January 1st... so I'm covered if I get the flu.

Presumably not if he gets ill in December, after using up all/most of the time off.

And it's only going to get worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[hawguy]

Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.

Which strains were in this year's vaccine?

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[masternerdguy]

Fortunately one of the entities I work for forces all employees to be vaccinated (it's free), so I am covered. I also get free mandatory TB testing which is peace of mind. Personally I think more employers should mandate (but provide for free) flu vaccines every season. Would greatly improve productivity and popular health.

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[hawguy]

Here's a fun fact to contemplate. The version wandering the US right now is H3N2. The prevalent strain making the rounds in China is H1N1. How long before it crosses the pacific and starts round two of the process. Folks if you haven't gotten vaccinated against this yet. DO IT NOW! These strains are no fun and the current vaccine is supposedly a good match against the strains most prevalent.

Which strains were in this year's vaccine?

Oops, answered my own question:

http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm315365.htm

Based on that information and the recommendations of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the strains selected for inclusion in the 2012-2013 flu vaccines are:
A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus
A/Victoria/361/2011 (H3N2)-like virus
B/Wisconsin/1/2010-like virus.

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[John3]

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/01/flu_deaths_influenza_cases.html

The most common strain this year is H3N2 and it's one of the strains covered in this year's flu shot.

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[h4rr4r]

Mandatory TB testing would suck for me. Outside the US vaccination for this is common. Made it tough for me as a kid when we switched schools.

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[CanHasDIY]

free mandatory

Does Not Compute

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[LunaticTippy]

H3N2 is a common strain every year. It mutates all the time. There is no flu shot that covers H3N2, it will cover a particular mutation of that type. For example, the current flu shot covers an H3N2 strain first identified in 2011, and an H1N1 strain first identified in 2009.

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[siride]

It's required, but doesn't cost anything. Pretty simple concept!

Re:And it's only going to get worse.

[CanHasDIY]

It's required, but doesn't cost anything. Pretty simple concept!

Paper money is not the only kind of 'cost,' which was the point I was getting at. If something is compulsory, it is not cost-free, or else it wouldn't be compulsory.

Flu shots

[golodh]

This looks like a good opportunity to study how effective flu shots are.

I'd like to see a breakdown of flu patients by whether they had a flu shot in the past 6 months.

If it's effective, probably best to mandate flu shots for health care workers, shop attendants, and all civil servants.

Re:Flu shots

[masternerdguy]

I'd also mandate them for public utility workers, public transit workers, and food service workers.

Re:Flu shots

[foniksonik]

Or it could be that people who get flu shots are still carriers and are spreading it even more and with now stronger strains (having battled with a strengthened immune system recently).

Re:Flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

Great idea, but maybe we should go further and require all vaccines and drugs to undergo testing prior to sale to the public. Otherwise anyone could stick snake oil in a bottle and sell it as flu vaccine.

Re:Flu shots

[kwerle]

My partner is a nurse. Her choices are:
* Get a flu shot
or
* Wear a surgical mask for the flu months while at work (I think that's December-February)

Re:Flu shots

[halfelven]

We know that already. They are about 60% effective.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/01/08/168814935/can-you-get-a-flu-shot-and-still-get-the-flu

Re:Flu shots

[h4rr4r]

That could be very misleading. People who are elderly, immunocompromised or exposed to sick people via work are the most likely to be immunized.

You would need to do a real double blind study. Pick some population give half the real deal and the other half saline and wait and see what happens.

Re:Flu shots

[Tack]

Hopefully the second option is only available to her if she has a demonstrated allergy or other adverse reaction to the flu shot? Otherwise, the two choices ought to be "get a flu shot" or "find another job" given how well established the risk-benefit is.

Re:Flu shots

[kwerle]

Meh. Wearing a mask for 3 months sucks - I don't know of anyone at her hospital that does it. But I think it's a fair option.

The flu shot is supposed to keep you safe from some limited number of flu viruses, right? A mask ought to block 'em all (and more) - as efficiently as a mask does. Dunno how well that is.

Re:Flu shots

[CanHasDIY]

My partner is a nurse. Her choices are:
* Get a flu shot
or
* Wear a surgical mask for the flu months while at work (I think that's December-February)

Personally, I'd go with option 2, if for nothing other than the style factor.

OK, so maybe a surgical mask isn't all that stylish... but it does seriously freak some people's shit when you wear one in public!

Re:Flu shots

[RazorSharp]

Or it could be that people who get flu shots are still carriers and are spreading it even more and with now stronger strains (having battled with a strengthened immune system recently).

Who are you to let biology get in the way of an infeasible solution that thinks about the children? Obviously you're not thinking of the children. You hate children.

Re:Flu shots

[geekoid]

"who get flu shots are still carriers "
people who get the flu shot can not be carriers. Unless you get some on your hands from someone else and then spread it to a door knob.

People who get the vaccine can not cause a mutation. depending on the year and strain match.

I'm not sure you understand how the immune system works.

Re:Flu shots

[geekoid]

No it isn't.
A) She is now a vector for mutation
B) When she is not at work, coughing and sneezing can cause her to spread the virus onto her hands, clothes, arms, etc.
C) She won't wear it 100% of the time,. Presumably she will eat and take breaks. During which time she can spread it.
D) She deals with compromised immune systems.
E) While there is a flu season, it's still spread throughout the whole year, just not as prevalent.

Frankly, she should not be in a hospital or Dr. Office.

"A mask ought to block 'em all (and more)"
If ti is the right kind and it's seal with duct tape around her face, and she never takes it off, then yes.

Re:Flu shots

[geekoid]

60% or more. depending an a variety of factors.

Re:Flu shots

[CohibaVancouver]

I'm not sure you understand how the immune system works.

This.

Unforunately, it's why many many otherwise intelligent people refuse vaccinations, or quote weird stats or claim they've eaten enough vitamins.

People don't understand how the immune system works, nor do they understand how vaccinations work: "Vaccines aren't natural!" What's more natural than using your immune system to fight disease?

Re:Flu shots

[koan]

You understand that flu shots target a narrow band prediction of the virus, it isn't good for every flu out there, so they could have all had a flu shot and still gotten sick.

Re:Flu shots

[koan]

So you want to live in a country where people are forced to get vaccinations for the flu, even though the vaccine might not even be effective depending on what you catch.

Re:Flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is gonna do the unbiased study, the vaccine producers or those opposed by principle?.... Do this, if your few data points gathered in your own experience show flu shots are effective, go for it by all means, if the show the opposite say no.
And by the way discussing vaccinations is irrelevant. It matters what vaccine, produced by whom, distributed with which precautions, and so on.
 

Re:Flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandate?

Fuck that shiat. I'm not getting an invasive procedure done for work.

I never get sick anyway. I have got the flu once in my entire life. On average I get a mild cold once every 5 to 10 years. Fuck flu shots.

Re:Flu shots

[Dereck1701]

"60% or more. depending an a variety of factors."

Not quite, here's some quotes from the CDC
"How well the flu vaccine works (or its ability to prevent influenza illness) can range widely from season to season and also can vary depending on who is being vaccinated."
"Preliminary data for the 2010-2011 influenza season indicate that influenza vaccine effectiveness was about 60% for all age groups combined, and that almost all influenza viruses isolated from study participants were well-matched to the vaccine strains (Unpublished CDC data)"

I don't know about your interpretation of those statements but mine says that, at least among all age groups, 60% is probably about the best case scenario for the influenza vaccine. It sounds like on some years it can be quite a bit less. There is also the question of what their definition of "effective" is (no symptoms, mild symptoms, communicability, etc)
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/vaccineeffect.htm

Re:Flu shots

[GNious]

Interesting - I recall that we we're told to not wear breathing-apparatuses (e.g. diving-gear) for extended periods for health-reasons (water in lungs?), and could imagine that wearing surgical masks for 8 hours daily for 3 months might lead to some issues.

Re:Flu shots

[SolitaryMan]

Oh, sweet baby flying spaghetti monster, not this crap again...

Yes, I want to live in the country where unhealthy people stay the fuck out of food service jobs.

Re:Flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife is also a nurse, and her hospital uses this policy. Almost all nurses get the vaccine to avoid having to mask all the time. There are only a very small minority who refuse the vaccine and wear the mask, and they are often restricted to light duty. When staffing her clinics, she will more likely schedule the vaccinated nurses over the unvaccinated nurses, so the ones who don't get the vaccine may not get as many hours of work as those who do (another incentive for getting the shot).

Re:Flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

Then wouldn't it make more sense to approach it from a time off perspective? Having worked in the industry and getting sick they tend to not give you the day off (I was threatened with termination) so there you go, bad economy, terrified of losing their shitty jobs, and can't call in sick because the boss might can you.
Besides when you're paid minimum wage who can afford to miss even one day?

Some people simply can't afford to call in even when they are sick, so take personal responsibility and stay out of restaurants and quit trying to create some fascist state for what amounts to your convenience.

I'm home sick, now.

[mark_reh]

A couple of my coworkers came to work sick over the last two weeks. I asked them why they come to work when they are sick- they are dentists at a public heath clinic,and should now better, but they come to work any way. Their response: they feel like they have to be there. Starting their own mini epidemic among patients and coworkers...

Maybe the problem is that unused sick time can be rolled into vacation time.

Re:I'm home sick, now.

[durrr]

Where should the treshhold to sick be drawn? A light cough and running nose would mean me staying at home ~1 month per year.

Re:I'm home sick, now.

[BMOC]

Maybe the problem is that unused sick time can be rolled into vacation time.

This is actually the problem. My company doesn't work this way anymore. Sick time is allowed to be taken as needed and does not accumulate. However if you go above X hours a year of sick time you get a stern lecture from your level X boss, if you go above Y hours, Y+X boss, etc... It doesn't get abused often I don't think, at least I haven't seen it.

Re:I'm home sick, now.

[geekoid]

Since it's an influenza, the line is drawn at 'you have influenza.

It's not a 'you wont get sick' shot. It's a 'It will prevent influenza strains in most people who get a shot', shot.

Re:I'm home sick, now.

[geekoid]

They should be sent home by the rest of the staff.

Re:I'm home sick, now.

[Shados]

If everyone you work with stays home when they have a light cough and running nose, you won't have it that much (unless you have kids).

Also, you having a light cough and running nose (assuming its a cold and not allergies), is still the same darn cold virus. If -I- get it from you, I'm out and coughing bloods for 2 weeks because of some chronic throat issues I have (nothing dangerous to my life, but it hurts like a bitch, and I can't get any work done, even from home, while i'm coughing my brain out).

So the threshold is drawn at "contagious disease, if you know thats what you have". Sure, it won't be 100%, people will make mistakes, often its contagious before you feel sick so you'll get SOME people sick no matter what, but a lot less, so people at your office aren't sick a month per year.

Re:I'm home sick, now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fever of 102deg or more.

24,000 Americans die each year

[TubeSteak]

While the CDC does not keep a tab of deaths overall from the flu, it estimates that 24,000 Americans die each year.

Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?
You can make policy without hard numbers, but you will never know if the policy is effective.

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[durrr]

Elderly and children do not respond with classic symptoms always, along with possible co-infections and whatnot else it's pretty hard to tell if it's actually flu, some passing other infection, or other natural causes.

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[kwerle]

While the CDC does not keep a tab of deaths overall from the flu, it estimates that 24,000 Americans die each year.

Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?
You can make policy without hard numbers, but you will never know if the policy is effective.

Huh.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
...

Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
...

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[demonlapin]

It's essentially impossible to do so. Influenza itself is not guaranteed to appear in the list of factors contributing to death on the death certificate. Respiratory failure, bronchitis, pneumonia, sepsis, cardiomyopathy, multi-system organ failure - all are likely to be true. Who knows if you'll get "influenza" on that list?

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[h4rr4r]

You plan on testing every corpse?

Odds are the cause of death on the certificate will be organ failure, pneumonia, or something like that. This makes it very hard to track those numbers.

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[Anonymous Coward]

While the CDC does not keep a tab of deaths overall from the flu, it estimates that 24,000 Americans die each year.

Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?
You can make policy without hard numbers, but you will never know if the policy is effective.

Huh.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm ...

Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692 ...

Bacterial infections are the #1 cause of pneumonia in the US. So how many of those were from the flu, and how many were from non-flu pneumonia?

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[Anonymous Coward]

So apparently the stats lie.. Don't get me wrong. I get the shot every year, as does my wife and son and am a large proponent of vaccination... However,

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/11/22/flu-deaths-crowe.html

From the above article:

Another model assumes that every extra death that happens in the winter is a flu death. At the risk of oversimplifying, this is the basic formula of that model: winter deaths (minus) summer deaths = death by flu virus.

That includes winter deaths from slippery sidewalks, snowy roads, freezing temperatures, plus all the winter heart failure, lung failure and deaths from cancer. In the language of the computer model, all excess mortality in winter is considered "death by flu."

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[geekoid]

We're pretty good at extrapolating data. And Flu deaths aren't mandatory to report, but some so.
Most people die from secondary reason brought on by the flu, so it's not the cause of death, even though the cause of death was brought on by the flu. Just like most people don't die from AIDS, they die from some other infection that gets a foothold becasue of AIDS.

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[Anonymous Coward]

What's important to an epidemiologiest is how disease spreads and what can be done to combat the disease and its spread.

The U.S. may want to know, but it wouldn't really help anyone concerned with the task of 'fighting' the flu.

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[radtea]

Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692

Right, so how many died of the flu?

0? 53,692?

This is the dirty little open secret of the anti-flu business: no one knows how many people die of the flu. The number is certainly not zero, but it is equally certainly not the full tally of "flu plus other things that present similar symptoms that are not the flu".

So the question remains: "Why doesn't the CDC keep tabs on overall deaths from the flu?" and the answer is: "It is not economic to do a proper diagnosis of every fatality from 'flu and penumonia'."

The real question is: why so much hype around flu shots, whose effectiveness varies from year to year but is never over 75% (and sometimes is considerably less) when every now and then a problematic batch produces a risk of about 1 in a million of serious neurological consequnces? The risk of death from "flu and pneumonia" is about 1 in a million amongst healthy adults, so the risk of death from flu is lower than that.

There is an argument to be made for flu shots amongst health care workers, the elderly, and possibly the very young (risk goes up dramatically below the age of 5), but the case is much harder to make--except possibly for herd immunity--amongst healthy adults.

When I worked in a hospital I got my flu shot. Now that I don't, I don't.

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[kwerle]

According to wikipedia:
Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung—affecting primarily the microscopic air sacs known as alveoli.[1][2] It is usually caused by infection with viruses or bacteria and less commonly other microorganisms, certain drugs and other conditions such as autoimmune diseases.[1][3]

Influenza, commonly known as the 'flu' , is an infectious disease of birds and mammals caused by RNA viruses of the family Orthomyxoviridae, the influenza viruses.

If pneumonia is primarily caused by influenza, then it really doesn't make too much sense to differentiate how many died of the flu vs. how many died of pneumonia caused by the flu.

I don't know. I'm not a doctor or a scientist. The CDC seems to think flu shots are pretty effective at preventing flu:
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5502a1.htm

Re:24,000 Americans die each year

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true on the "flu like symptoms" and lumping everything into one "death count".

Some interesting reading for you about the effectiveness for kids, adults, health care workers:

- Cochrane Review - Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults-
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005187/influenza-vaccination-for-healthcare-workers-who-work-with-the-elderly
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD004879/vaccines-for-preventing-influenza-in-healthy-children

Then there is the out of season research showing that the claims of "lives saved" by the vaccine are at best 1/5th of what the CDC claims:

- Dr Lisa Jackson's out of season influenza vaccine research
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/2/337.short

Optimize your vitamin D3, wash your hands a lot, wear a mask. Those work.

Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

So how many government flu prevention programs were underfunded because republicans felt wars are a better use of our borrowed money? How did Bush cause this crisis?

Re:Republicans

[EmagGeek]

Why is it the government's responsibility to prevent people getting the flu, when people already know how not to get it and simply choose to engage in the risky behaviors that result in getting and transmitting it?

Re:Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let's put all these sick motherfuckers in jail! That'll teach them to get sick and miss work.

Re:Republicans

[CanHasDIY]

DNFTT, man. Dude's fishin'.

Re:Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as the SENATE run by the DNC hasn't voted on a budget in over 3 years, the answer to your question is zero.

Now you may want to rephrase the question by asking how many budgets passed by the GOP controlled house included flu prevention program funding that Harry Reid has refused to allow to come up for a vote in the Senate?

Your ignorance is showing.

Re:Republicans

[siride]

You speak as if getting the flu is entirely your fault. Maybe it's OTHER people engaging in risky and dangerous behavior that gets YOU sick. Certainly the government stepping in to solve that kind of problem makes total sense. But yes, let's blame the victims, as usual in Republican America.

Re:Republicans

[DragonWriter]

Seeing as the SENATE run by the DNC hasn't voted on a budget in over 3 years

The Senate is not run by the Democratic National Committee.

The Senate has not only voted on but passed budgets in each of the last three years (and every year previously); if they didn't, there would be a government shutdown, as the government doesn't operate without a budget (even a late budget would produce a shutdown, it just wouldn't last the whole year.)

I keep hearing this "no budget" thing in various forms (Obama hasn't passed a budget -- as if the President passes budgets -- in X years, the US hasn't had a budget in X years, the Senate hasn't voted on a budget in X years) in different forums, but I don't understand how people can believe it. In fact, it has voted on several different budgets in most of those years; for instance, before later passing a budget, it defeated the House-passed 2012 budget on a 40-57 vote less than two months after the House passed it.

Re:Republicans

[geekoid]

Becasue ti's a societal impact, that can have sever consequence on everyone.
herd immunity means less chance of mutation, and protection for the people who can not get a vaccines, or the vaccine didn't take well to them.

Society has an interest in the streets not being littered with dead people.

Re:Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, because during the entire time that Obama has been in office. And the DNC has held majority of the senate, they haven't passed a budget. They've passed a "continuation of operation" which means that they go back to the last time a budget passed and say this should be sufficient to run for X days. Honestly, how ignorant do you have to be to swallow talking points. The problem of course is that because the last time a budget was passed was back before Pres. Bush left office, that continuation is about half of what it is under Obama.

You know, the one that's blowing through $4trillion/year right now. And every time that someone wants to cut money out of it, it gets shot down. Either by the president, or the senate, or by the republicans when either the senate or president come back wanting *more* money.

Re:Republicans

[Anonymous Coward]

Once again we have a liberal OUTRIGHT LYING to give a free pass to the jackass that is Harry Reid. Lets check Politifact and see what they say. As of Sept 12, 2012 it was said "We haven’t passed a budget in more than three years and not a single appropriations bill has been brought to the floor this year." and that statement was rated as absolutely true.

I'm constantly amazed at how often liberals outright lie and assume no one calls them on it. That's right, you are a liar and are part of the problem this country faces. We would be in a better position if people like you didn't express statements that were lies because so much has to be done to fight the lie that we can't make any progress afterwards.

Help!

[DeTech]

I work/Live in boston and half the office is out and all I hear around me is coughing/sneezing/sniffling... If I didn't have to be here this week I'd be telecommuting but alias I'm boned. Anybody got any great ideas for combating this outbreak in a open lab type environment.

Re:Help!

[demonlapin]

Go to a hardware store and look for an N95 Respirator mask. That will protect you against everything (including TB) if it's properly fitted.

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

take a high dose of vitamin D daily, gargle Listerine a few times a day. they say it doesn't help, but anything that kills germs is a help. the D will help bolster the immune system along with every thing else in your body. its just all round good for you.

g luck

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.filteryourlife.com/

Re:Help!

[vlm]

It was a high dose of zinc plus some homeopathic garbage, any person with a science background should be laughing. It did have enough zinc, however, to cause quite a few people to overdose. From my experience welding galvanized sheetmetal (don't do this at home kids) this is to be strongly avoided, but somewhat below the dosage required for semi-permanent flu like symptoms, you'll get semi-permanent loss of smell.

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work/Live in boston and half the office is out and all I hear around me is coughing/sneezing/sniffling... If I didn't have to be here this week I'd be telecommuting but alias I'm boned. Anybody got any great ideas for combating this outbreak in a open lab type environment.

Your alias is 'Boned'? Bad choice, I'd say.

Re:Help!

[vlm]

anything that kills germs is a help

LOL inflaming your skin and mucous membranes is the exact opposite of what you want to do... Its like telling a guy with a paper cut that the best treatment is rubbing salt and dirt into the wound.

Re:Help!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring a bat or other suitable melee weapon. Aim for the head, but cowardice is a valor and bravery makes you dead. Wear heavy leather, don't forget the gloves. Upgrade to riot gear when you can. Stay away from crowds. Leave remorse at the door and don't cry over lost love ones. Seek secure shelter, water, food, and friends, in that order. And remember to vet the friends, too often they can be a net loss. You can survive this. Be strong.

Re:Help!

[CanHasDIY]

Go to a hardware store and look for an N95 Respirator mask. That will protect you against everything (including TB) if it's properly fitted.

Aww, but this one has so much more WOW factor!

Re:Help!

[Dereck1701]

I've been sucking down Orange Juice and Milk, along with trying to choose vitamin rich foods and using multivitamins for the past few days. So far so good, even with a coworker hacking like she's been mining coal all her life sitting around the corner from me. Only time will tell though I suppose. I wish wearing N95 masks was more socially acceptable here in the US, from what I understand ~98% of common cold infections occur due to someone coughing/talking within 6' of you while their infectious, and I must have had a half dozen people stop in and sit across from me today alone trying to suppress coughs.

Re:Help!

[Rob Simpson]

Heh, Zicam. A homeopathic 1X dilution of zinc gluconate, which is 10% w/v, or 10 grams per 100mL. You might as well be snorting pure powder. Though there was nothing "semi" about the permanent loss of smell for some people.

Re:Help!

[vlm]

You might as well be snorting pure powder. Though there was nothing "semi" about the permanent loss of smell for some people.

Um OK. I read some wikipedia and I guess thats the case. I have 1st and 2nd hand experience with "zinc fever" from inhaling vaporized welding zinc and that's (thankfully) definitely temporary, at least for the vast majority. When you overdose beyond the "can't smell" stage I can verify its kinda like having the flu, at least if inhaled. The urban legend is you drink milk, lots of milk, to cure.

CDC doesn't show this

[vlm]

I'm confused WRT

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/

I was just looking there this morning and thought to myself, how nice it is that the peak is already over, and the flu season has begun its decline.

I do see that its "normal" that a "bad year" has about 10 times the deaths as a "good year". So about twice as bad as last year (a "good" year) it doesn't look like its the end of the world yet.

I did look at some historical records and the higher the peaks seem to go with earlier peaks, this peak being somewhere in between would imply its a moderately bad year.

Not quite 1918 yet, or ?

Re:CDC doesn't show this

[tompaulco]

I also was confused when they say it is 10 times as bad, and yet somehow only twice the percentage of people who came to the doctor had flu-like symptoms. Of course, the only people I know of who go to the doctor when they are sick are people who don't pay any co-pays or -co-insurance. The rest of us just stay and sleep, or go to work and make everybody else sick because we'll get fired if we don't.

Staying home when sick...

[mark-t]

... isn't always viable, unless you happen to have a tidy nestegg of funds sitting in reserve to tide you over while you recover. Not to mention the fact that your workload is only going to be that much worse (and in turn, more stressful, which is bad for your health) when you return because perish the thought if management should have to try to figure out, without any warning, how to redelegate some of your job to others while you are away.

Re:Staying home when sick...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell can't go a week without a paycheck? That's not a netegg, that's petty cash. A nestpebble.

Are we such a society of debters that we're living hand-to-mouth and one lost paycheck would break us?

If this is you, you need to reevaluate your finances and budget. Are you under some sort of hideously crushing debt? Even then you should have enough float for a week. Are you being paid under a living wage? Then WTF are you doing on Slashdot!? Get the fuck out there, learn how to code, how to manage sharepoint, how to kiss bootleather, how to install the LAMP stack, or anything that improves your value so you can SELL YOURSELF.

Re:Staying home when sick...

[mark-t]

Who the hell can't go a week without a paycheck?

You might be surprised. I'd dare say a significant majority of the population... all in the low income range, however.

Re:Staying home when sick...

[sjames]

It's a sad commentary on our society but it's absolutely true.

Re:Staying home when sick...

[sjames]

Are we such a society of debters that we're living hand-to-mouth and one lost paycheck would break us?

For the most part, yes. It might have something to do with income being flat over the last 3 decades of inflation and health care inflating at 4 times the average rate.

Some people find whoring to be an unacceptable option.

Re:Staying home when sick...

[tompaulco]

Are we such a society of debters that we're living hand-to-mouth and one lost paycheck would break us?
Well, I didn't used to be but inflation has caught up to and surpassed me. It used to be that I was able to get by and even had some nice luxuries like a $40,000 sports car. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the cost of living has gone up by 20% or so per year and my salary has gone up by 0% per year, and now the sports car is gone, several other luxuries are gone, and I live paycheck-to-paycheck. Every year with my salary remaining the same and the cost of living going up brings the inevitable bankruptcy closer to fruition.
I did put a lot of money away for a rainy day, but most of it was stolen away from me by wall street thiefs, and the rest of it is tied up in "retirement" funds which I can't get without paying a hefty tax burden and also a penalty for early withdrawal. Once I reach retirement age, I should be pretty comfortable for about 2 or 3 years, but I don't know if I'll make it to retirement.

Re:Staying home when sick...

[WildBlueYonder]

Some people find whoring to be an unacceptable option.

Especially when they have the flu, that will definitely spread the disease.

Thank you anti-vaxers!

[ilsaloving]

I hope you're proud of yourselves. How does it feel to be accessories to completely unnecessary deaths?

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Anonymous Coward]

But, but, but, mercury and toxins!

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[CanHasDIY]

I hope you're proud of yourselves. How does it feel to be accessories to completely unnecessary deaths?

Bullshit.

No one controls your actions but you; the anti-vaxxers did not put a gun to anyone's head. Stop trying to blame everyone else for your own mistakes.

Caveat: I do not agree with the anti-vaxxers, merely pointing out that your ass is your responsibility, no one else's.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are free to bump every vaccine there is into yourself. You are not free to do that to me. If vaccines are as good as you say, then you should be fine.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you're proud of yourselves. How does it feel to be accessories to completely unnecessary deaths?

The flu vaccine is somewhere between 40% and 70% effective against the strains that are included in the shot. So even on a year with a good match, it only prevents infection about half the time.

If you're not elderly, it's not worth the cost of the vaccine.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, I was pretty sure that "artificially trying to boost your immune system" (aka, killing things with very little impact to your own) was the number one problem with respect to immunology in the history of human medicine.

It is the reason autoimmune is increasing, it is the reason higher infection rates are happening, and it is the number one reason why super-strains are coming about because no damn human has been able to evolve alongside the virus at the same speed.

No, you are the problem. Learn to deal with the damn infection and suck on some damn honey sweets if you have a dry throat. And stop your damn coughing and learn how to clear your throat properly.
The only people who need any vaccine are vulnerable people. If you are completely fine and getting these things, you are everything wrong with medicine today.

Antibiotics and unneeded vaccines are the worst weapon the human race has ever created. Period.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[SleazyRidr]

But it was the anti-vaxxers who reduced the number of people by enough that the transmission rates have gone up. I am vaccinated, but I know that it is not 100% effective. If it's 90% effective and I'm the only person who has it I still have a 10% risk. If everyone around me has also had it my risk drops to 1%. These statistics matter when you start talking about outbreaks and pandemics.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[PhxBlue]

If you're not elderly, it's not worth the cost of the vaccine.

I got my shot through the VA back in September for free, so for me at least, it was worth the cost. :)

In most civilized countries, I imagine you don't have to pay for the flu shot. Free health care and all that.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you're proud of yourselves. How does it feel to be accessories to completely unnecessary deaths?

You assume your opinion equates to fact.

It doesn't.

The weak and infirm are the ones who die from the flu.

It is simply natural selection at work.

And you are a simple-minded fool.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Anonymous Coward]

How were things when flu vaccines did not exist? IT WAS HELL ON EART oh wait it was exactly the same. Or the studies rewrote history maybe... Ask your granny.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[Dereck1701]

To be honest disease spread and mortality have come down significantly per capita in the past 292 years (since Small Pox Vaccine). But to claim that it is primarily based on vaccination is laughable. Vaccines have been one small part of a vast change in lifestyle, knowledge, medical techniques & and sanitation. As little as 50 years ago we were dumping raw sewage into rivers and walking around with handkerchiefs (ye'olde Kleenex) in our pockets. 120 years ago we were amputating limbs with carpentry saws and treating diseases with bleeding and leaches 150 years ago in urban areas we were whipping bowls of feces and urine our of second story windows into the streets. Vaccines have been and will continue to be a valuable option to fight disease, but they are FAR from the final solution that so many try to make them out to be.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[tompaulco]

And stop your damn coughing and learn how to clear your throat properly.
I don't understand coughing. Even when I'm sick, I hardly ever feel the urge to cough. It is only if I try to talk when i am very sick that I will get a tickle in the back of my throat that makes me cough. My wife, on the other hand, coughs a lot at night, even when she is not sick. There are people at work that just always cough, sick or not sick, all day long. I don't get it.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[CanHasDIY]

But it was the anti-vaxxers who reduced the number of people by enough that the transmission rates have gone up. I am vaccinated, but I know that it is not 100% effective. If it's 90% effective and I'm the only person who has it I still have a 10% risk. If everyone around me has also had it my risk drops to 1%. These statistics matter when you start talking about outbreaks and pandemics.

That's perfectly reasonable. What's not reasonable is OP's emotional screed laying the responsibility for his health on everyone but himself.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[CowTipperGore]

Unfortunately, you (and those who modded you up) seem to have no understanding of the flu vaccine. Your numbers are complete bunk. Unlike most "traditional" vaccines where the target is pretty well understood, the flu vaccine is a crap shoot every single year. If 100% of the population was vaccinated, your risk of getting the flu that year may be the same as another year when no one was vaccinated, because those making the vaccines very well may have guessed wrong on the strains that would be prevalent in that year.

The national news carried reports up until a few weeks ago that this year's vaccine was a great match for the strains circulating in the wild (for example). With flu rates coming in at well-above average, this story suddenly went away. If the vaccine was such a good match when we were urging everyone to get a shot, why it is suddenly so ineffective? (And, yes, that is an actual question, not a smart-ass rhetorical one.)

Actual evidence for the effectiveness of the flu vaccine is non-existent. Do yourself a favor and read some of the recent reports about this from reputable sources. For example, the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy released a report just a few months ago indicating that influenza vaccinations provide only modest protection for healthy young and middle-age adults and virtually no protection to those 65 and older. They concluded that US federal vaccination recommendations are based on inadequate evidence and poorly executed studies. You can get a PDF of the report here. The Center's director is not an "anti-vaxxer" but an experienced expert and government insider. He still recommends the vaccine in general because it is quite safe even if the paybacks are greatly overstated.

You might also want to review some of the Cochrane Collaboration's reports. In the past few years, they have found there is no evidence that vaccinating health care workers had any effect on influenza or pneumonia deaths in the elderly or that vaccinating the elderly provides any benefits to them, They also found that the flu vaccine has no impact on the number of people hospitalized, transmission rates in the population, or associated health complications. It does appear that in a year when the vaccine and virus mix actually match up well, healthy adults under 65 will see milder/fewer symptoms and gain an average of half a workday.

I do not get the flu vaccine. I also rarely get the flu (perhaps twice in the past decade). My spouse usually gets the vaccine for herself and our children. In my personal observations during the past decade, there is no discernible pattern to our infection rates from year to year, vaccination or not - sometimes our house sees a flu or two despite vaccinations and sometimes we see none despite no vaccinations. I'm not suggesting that the flu vaccine is dangerous or completely ineffective, but it seems obvious that the government and drug companies have vastly oversold it.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[SleazyRidr]

a) Ilsaloving never mentioned his own health. Us humans generally get upset when bad things happen to other people.

b) He's upset because what I said is basically common knowledge for most people and the recent outbreaks are just the logical result of not enough people getting vaccinated.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[SleazyRidr]

I thought it was fairly well understood why there was such a bad outbreak this year: the flu season hit earlier than usual so a lot of people haven't had the shot yet.

Re:Thank you anti-vaxers!

[CowTipperGore]

I saw a few articles last month speculating that the season would be a bad one because we were seeing a higher than normal rate of infection early in the season. I did not see any that made your follow up claim that it was caused by insufficient vaccination levels. In fact, the CDC reported about a month ago that this year's vaccination rates were similar to last year's. Would you mind sharing some support for your well understood reason?

Yep.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this was the first year where i got the flu when i didn't get a shot.
Every other time in my life when I've got the flu? I got the shot.
I believe in a lot of vaccines, but I'll /never/ believe in the flu shot.

Re:Yep.

[CanHasDIY]

I think this was the first year where i got the flu when i didn't get a shot. Every other time in my life when I've got the flu? I got the shot. I believe in a lot of vaccines, but I'll /never/ believe in the flu shot.

This.

Last time I got a flu shot was the most sick I've been in my life, nearly had to be hospitalized.

That was almost a decade ago. I haven't had a flu shot since, nor have I contracted any transmissible disease worse than the common cold.

I do, however, have to avoid people with strep throat, but not out of fear of getting sick - I am a carrier, and my wife is extremely susceptible to the disease.

Not always the case

[Shivetya]

I work with some people who have NOTHING else to do, hence they come in. There are even a few malicious types about too....

I mean, we can work from home and I know people who come to work to get away from the family.... and being sick is no reason for them to stay home.

So yeah, while some might come in because of unpaid sick time there are far too many who come in because they either don't know better, don't care, or don't have anything else to do.

Natural Selection in the Workplace

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at a place where a woman with raging H1N1 came in, and most of my department was laid up for over a week.

Her reason:

        She was out of sick days.
        She didn't want to be put on probation.
        She wanted to complete her project for the company.

Reasonable, but when I asked her in depth with a bunch of people at a 3-martini lunch, she continued with:

        If people are sick, it would lag the project enough for her to catch up.
        Sick people would show a drop in performance at their next review, increasing her chances for a raise.
        If enough people are out, it might force a reorg, and she would transfer to a better department. (75% would be fired during the reorg.)

Yes. It's not always about having to come into work when sick for the company. Sometimes people are just evil.

Re:Natural Selection in the Workplace

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a case of...woosh!

Thats it?

[Anonymous Coward]

700 cases in a city that is as big as boston? Thats not much for the flu really since the flu is incredibly easy to spread it shouldnt be a surprise. Boston has like 650,000 people in it, 700 isnt a small percent for something as easily transmittable as the flu.

And 18 deaths? Chances are those are the very elderly, or people already compromised to the point where anything would kill them. If the deaths were in the hundreds then it would be something to worry about but 18 out of 650k? Thats nothing. Chances are that 18 would have died this year anyway. Its just with the flu going around a little more than usual it caught up with them.

People die every year from the flu. It can not be avoided. There will always be thousands of deaths related to the flu because almost every person who does die is elderly and or infirm, people that are so close to death all it takes is a little nudge to get pushed over into it. Hell you get a decent sized old folks home and let a kid in there to see grandma with the flu and every person there will be sick and a few will die.

People seem to forget WE DIE. Especially old people and the flu kills lots of them because its too much for their body. You cant stop it.

Stay home two weeks?

[Catbeller]

You'd have to stay home until your symptoms disappear, as you're contagious the entire time. Not even the most liberal workplace would allow that.

And it might kill millions, some day, our addiction to "productivity". One bad virus plus our right-to-work culture will equal one mighty epidemic.

Galt doesn't mind

[Catbeller]

No force necessary. America's John Galts enjoy writing those rules.

Better a million die of plague, than one man get away with Galt's money on false pretenses.

The problem with Flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what would be the worse option.

o Lying in bed, alternately freezing and overheating, sneezing and coughing, not sure whether to be worried I was dying or to wish that I was
o Going in to work

Re:The problem with Flu shots

[Scarletdown]

I don't know what would be the worse option.

o Lying in bed, alternately freezing and overheating, sneezing and coughing, not sure whether to be worried I was dying or to wish that I was
o Going in to work, alternately freezing and overheating, sneezing and coughing, not sure whether to be worried I was dying or to wish that I was

FTFY

I think I've already had it, getting over it.

[BMOC]

It sucked. Infection that just wouldn't die and moved all over the place, sinuses, throat, lungs, nodes, etc... I'd stay home a day and think I was getting better, and it would just move somewhere else. Stupid flu.

Once again!

[Nexion]

We have another opportunity for the flu shot fascists to espouse their message of authority over individual rights, and perhaps some of the zealots who feel these shots are an affront to their deeply held beliefs? Bring forth the flu shot pseudoscience conjecture from both sides of the debate! Please, this time, explain how your sources established a large enough pool and maintained control of subjects to avoid contamination for a proper experiment! I bet our fascists have great suggestions on how we could better control unwilling medical experiment subjects taken from the peasantry! Please, I need a good laugh.

Nexion

not all corporations

[publiclurker]

just the ones that insist on blaming their victims in order to save a few bucks for their executive bonuses.

Sorry, sorry

[geekoid]

the way slashdot collapsed the comment I thought you were responding to someone else.
My fault for not expanding the comments first.

Why not to get vaccinated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just in case you wonder why somebody would not like to get a flu shot.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=vaccine+narcolepsy

Re:Why not to get vaccinated?

[AndyKron]

I love that thing! Local newspaper comments, here I come!

Boston hospitals already mandate them

[SuperBanana]

Flu shots are mandated for clinical staff by most if not all of the Boston hospitals, and there are a huge number of them - I've counted 11 so far, and I think I'm probably missing one or two:

Childrens, MGH, Brigham & Womens, Faulkner, Beth Israel, Tufts Medical Center, Spaulding Rehab, Shriners, Mass Eye&Ear, New England Baptist, Veterans Administration Boston...and those are just the ones that are actually in Boston proper.

Honestly, I think hospitals are part of the problem. They focus illness and weak populations (same with nursing homes and assisted living facilities.) Also, there tends to be huge pressure on clinical staff to report for work even when sick. The medical profession is astoundingly arrogant when it comes to not doing harm to patients...another good example would be the sloppy handwriting doctors use when filling out prescriptions, injuring or killing thousands.

Re:Boston hospitals already mandate them

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck!
When i worked for MGH they *made* me get shots or else they would lose my job. I worked with the computers in a recherché lab and had no interaction with patients. At first i avoided it, but they insisted. After getting the shot i was sick for two weeks. I will never forgive them for piercing my skin to infect me.

ONe of these days

[AndyKron]

One of these days scientists will invent a flu vaccine, and all of this will be history.

Re:ONe of these days

[Spy Handler]

if they invent one that's over 99% effective, and lasts a lifetime instead of having to get a different shot every season, then yeah I would say all of this will be history.

I don't get flu shots

[pr0t0]

That's actually a half-truth; I get them every three or four years to see if the same thing happens (oh boy). Every time I get a flu shot (here it comes), I get sick.

Sing with me: "IT'S NOT AN ACTIVE STRAIN! YOU CAN'T GET SICK FROM IT...MORON!"

Yeah, I know. I don't know what to tell you. It happens every single time, within 24 hours of the shot. Then, inevitably, because it's the wrong strain...I get sick again. I know a lot of people claim this. All I can say is biology and physiology are complex. There must be some kind of historical or environmental factor at play. I've lately decided it's maybe because I had mono once, really bad? Maybe I'm just unlucky and always seem to already have the flu just before the shot. Or maybe (probably) it's not the flu at all, but just flu-like systems brought on by my body's response to the shot. I dunno. It could be psychosomatic, but I was dead-certain it would not happen when I got the shot last year. I had to take the next two and a half days off afterward.

But I don't advocate that people should not get flu shots. I may be a crackpot, but I'm not crazy. You absolutely should. Even if there is a legitimate biological reason for every person to claim what I just have, it's still a pretty small minority. Get the shot.

Hey, at least I didn't claim it was a government conspiracy!

Re:I don't get flu shots

[static0verdrive]

I gotta say - you sound crazy; however, the same happened to me each of the three times I bothered to get the flu shot. I don't know why, and I don't tell anyone not to get it, but I skip it and some winters I simply don't get sick.

Re:I don't get flu shots

[tgd]

That's actually a half-truth; I get them every three or four years to see if the same thing happens (oh boy). Every time I get a flu shot (here it comes), I get sick.

Sing with me: "IT'S NOT AN ACTIVE STRAIN! YOU CAN'T GET SICK FROM IT...MORON!"

Actually, the correct statement is "its not an active strain, you can't get influenza from it". You will not get a self-replicating, contagious herd of viruses from getting the flu shot. That said, the whole intent of a vaccine is to trigger an immune response. If you don't get an immune response, its not a vaccine. So its "normal" to have "some" issue from them. Soreness, localized fever, etc. If you have a particularly aggressive immune system, you can get stronger symptoms (that's the ironic thing about immune systems -- the stronger it is, the stronger your symptoms of a disease are but the less likely it'll kill you...)

If you consistently have the problem, its also possible you are allergic to something in it. Have you tried one of the other types?

In either case, getting vaccinated -- even if you have some reactions to it -- is just taking one for the team. A very large part of why its so important to get immunized when vaccines are available isn't because its going to keep you from getting the disease. You're likely a healthy adult and you might, once in a while, get knocked on your ass and feel like crap and get over it. But very young children can't get the vaccines and can be killed by a lot of these diseases. You getting vaccinated means you can't give it to them.

That's why I get it. Everyone who dies from influenza every year got it from someone else. Bet they'd wish that someone else had gotten a dose, too ...

Re:I don't get flu shots

[WuphonsReach]

Depends on whether you got a flu shot or the fluemist. The nasal spray uses a weakened version of the virus.

Re:I don't get flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

you might be allergic to the stuff they make the shot with. My stepfather is.

Re:I don't get flu shots

[Anonymous Coward]

Like every other product you can get poor quality flu shots.

A few years back my 200 person company was close to an important contract deadline and was in danger of overrunning it if too many people took time off. As a preventative measure they decided to give everybody a free flu shot. Virtually everybody in the company immediately got the flu...

So, don't take whatever a drug company or their shill says as gospel. The high levels of corruption in the drug industry means you need to take everything they say with a huge grain of salt.

Look into vitamin D, iodine, and veggies

[Paul Fernhout]

Adequate Vitamin D helps prevent some flu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D_and_influenza
http://blog.vitamindcouncil.org/2011/12/07/the-difference-between-a-prophet-and-a-madman/

Adequate iodine may help prevent infections, too:
http://www.jmbblog.com/2009/11/iodine-the-forgotten-weapon-against-influenza-viruses/

So may eating a lot more vegetables:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cold-flu-flu-and-nutrition-dr-fuhrman-responds-to-comments.html

Look into iodine, vitamin D, and veggies

[Paul Fernhout]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3370847&cid=42540575

As in this other slashdot article, it looks like a large number of nurses also believe that a flu shot leads to flu:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/01/08/0219201/indiana-nurses-fired-after-refusing-flu-shots-on-religious-grounds

As a Great man once said

[rsilvergun]

better a thousand innocent men die then one guilty man go free. Or something like that, I wasn't really paying attention.

Free Government Money

[EmagGeek]

And that's what it's all about.

I call bullshit

[rsilvergun]

Serfs paid a their taxes to a lord who used the money to make his life better. That sounds more like the CEO of a corporation to me. You know the nice house you have? Know why you have it? Roads let us expand with cards, making land cheap enough to afford it. Roads paid for by the taxpayer. You know why it was the taxpayer? Because nothing, I mean nothing, is ever profitable enough for the kings and queens of America. Certainly not infrastructure.

Re:I call bullshit

[CanHasDIY]

Serfs paid a their taxes to a lord who used the money to make his life better. That sounds more like the CEO of a corporation to me.

Except that CEO's cannot (theoretically) make laws; lords can.

Anyway, I don't really get why AC used the term 'taxpayer' when discussing corporate sick leave policies, thus the correction.

You know the nice house you have? Know why you have it?

Actually, my house isn't all that nice, and I have it because apparently where I live, termite inspectors aren't bound by law to actually do an inspection before signing off, and there's no legal recourse against them if they file a false report. Grr.

Roads paid for by the taxpayer. You know why it was the taxpayer? Because nothing, I mean nothing, is ever profitable enough for the kings and queens of America. Certainly not infrastructure.

Indeed, which is why subsidizing infrastructure installations to private corporations is a really, really bad idea - the deal made between the government and Ma Bell regarding expansion of rural telecommunications systems being a prime example of what can go horribly wrong (essentially, AT&T took the money and ran, and is now fighting to keep from having to spend said tax dollars on the infrastructure it's specifically for).

My experience

[rsilvergun]

is if an employers asks for a doctor's note for every sick day it's a low level job that doesn't have useful insurance. You just end up getting fired.

You assume

[rsilvergun]

that after 20 years of rising medical costs that people can afford flu shots. $40-$50 bucks per family member is a lot of money on $8 bucks/hr.

Re:You assume

[Scarletdown]

$40-$50 bucks per family member is a lot of money on $8 bucks/hr.

For those earning such a low wage, it is foolish to go breeding themselves a family. As the old saying goes, "If you can't feed 'em, don't breed 'em."

Of course, if they were in a much higher paying job when they started a family, and then got downsized for whatever reason and had to take an $8/hr job just to have some income, then that's a whole 'nother story.

Got mine

[assertation]

I read this article at the end of my day. I got my flu snot at a supermarket on the way home. I live in the NE so it is only a matter of time before that flu "epidemic" comes to my town. I never get get sick, but I caught a lingering cold twice last month. It is worth $30 ( shame on you CareFirst Blue Cross/Blue Shield for not covering it ) to make sure that I am done with that kind of crap for the winter. Just do it.

Re:Got mine

[tompaulco]

It is worth $30 ( shame on you CareFirst Blue Cross/Blue Shield for not covering it ) to make sure that I am done with that kind of crap for the winter. Just do it.
If you are like me, then having gotten your shot, you will now get sick.
Also, if BCBS thought that it would be worth paying $30 to prevent you from getting a more expensive sickness, then they would do it in a heartbeat. The fact that they didn't makes me think they don't believe the flu shot will do any good.

Re:Got mine

[David_W]

shame on you CareFirst Blue Cross/Blue Shield for not covering it

FYI, assuming your plan is somewhat similar to mine (same insurer), they will cover it in a "clinical" setting (i.e., doctor's office). Of course the catch there is a lot of offices can't give it on a normal visit unless you are deemed "high risk" and you have to show up to one of the cattle lines, er "flu shot clinics". So there are ways to get them to pay, but sometimes it's just easier to pay the $30 like you did...

Re:Got mine

[CptNerd]

I got my flu snot at a supermarket on the way home.

I have to say: Eeeeewww, that's one vaccination method I don't want to even contemplate!

yes, I know it's a typo...

Re:Got mine

[assertation]

Do you have any hard information ( not anti-vac or alternative healthy copy ) to base that on?

Re:Got mine

[assertation]

LOL

Re:Got mine

[tompaulco]

Do you have any hard information ( not anti-vac or alternative healthy copy ) to base that on?
Nope. Just good old fashioned follow-the-money. If the insurance company would rather risk the chance of you getting the flu than pay up front for the shot, then that is a good indicator that they don't think the shot is going to help you.

Re:Got mine

[assertation]

The possibility you didn't mention is that insurance companies simply do not want to pay for anything that they do not have to pay for and will not if there are no consequences for them.

I am healthy. If I catch the flu I will get over it with the only damage being lost time at work and feeling badly for about two weeks. That doesn't cost the insurance company anything, yet the flu shot could still work and the medical advisors to an insurance company can still believe that flu shots work.

Re:Got mine

[assertation]

Thanks for the interesting reply.

You are right, if I went through the hassle of getting an appointment with a doctor I would likely still have a copay, in addition to the loss of time of getting to a doctor.

Since I am working it was worth it to the get the shot, get it now and get that item off of my schedule.

Remember to shake the managers hand

[elucido]

Because it's always good to share the love with the person who threatens your job if you get sick.

death by driving

[Anonymous Coward]

Boston suffered 334 deaths from motor vehicles last year.

No panic alarm was activated.

Re:death by driving

[tompaulco]

Boston suffered 334 deaths from motor vehicles last year.
And Boston is considered to have a low Motor Vehicle Death rate. Probably because they can't find a street that goes in one direction long enough to get up to lethal speed.

Ignorant Advice for the USA

[rubycodez]

we can lose our jobs or be penalized for staying home. on the other hand, if we go to work we can infect the money grubbing scum and shitty co-workers who put us through hell monday through friday. fuck 'em.

Orlando statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the local outpatient clinic chains in Orlando reported some interesting numbers. Christmas week 2011 they saw 20 cases of the flu. Christmas week 2012 they saw 637 cases.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/breakingnews/os-flu-cases-record-20121231,0,1516649.story

Which side is the "safe" side?

[zippthorne]

Is the mask supposed to protect you from others, or the other way around?

Re:Which side is the "safe" side?

[kwerle]

Is the mask supposed to protect you from others, or the other way around?

Some of both, I should think. But it seems likely that surgeons don't wear them to protect themselves. They wear them to protect the patient's delicate insides from their icky mouth gunk.

Things that help with the flu.

[rs79]

Both the Norovirus and the Flu swept though here over xmas, we're all fine now, it was fairly mild. I saw my doc today for the annual checkup thing and joked about the empty waiting room and how everyone must be over it. He said no, they're all at emerg and he saw 46 people yesterday with it and it's the worst it's been for years.

He said it's Type A flu.

These seemed to help, me at least, maybe that's why it was fairly mild around here while other folks seemed to be having a harder time of it.

http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/medicine/vitamins/flu/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/medicine/ginger/

I have no idea why but chilis, garlic and ginger help A LOT too. But you have to get fairly large amounts into you. 3 or 4 garlic cloves a day and commensurate amounts of the others. This also seems to go a long way towards preventing a secondary infection too. I *always* used to get them, now, I don't since I started doing this about 7 years ago. Not once.

Flu rarely kills. It's the secondary infection that gets you. Lots of vitamin C and garlic goes a long way there, C is essential in the immune system and whenever the body heals and gets used up very quickly; you want lots in your system when it heals after the virus makes a mess, that's when you'll get a secondary infection if you're going to get one.

When flu does kill it's because of a Cytokine storm which is a feed forward loop where the immune system tries to kill itself and you drown in fluid in the lungs. Two things have been shown to stop this: niacin and smoking a cigarette. They hate to admit this, but it's true and there's ongoing research into nicotiine, nicotinic acid and related compounds to stop this.

The most conservative study shows C itself knocks a day off. Take really big, (15g/day) doses and it works even better. Two years ago when H1N1 went through here I was sick for 2 days with it. My ex died from it. I found the list of vitamins to take I gave here on her fridge when me and the kids cleaned out out. She never got any of them.

Also, olive leaf extract has been clinically shown to prevent flu in 20% of cases, but doesn't do a damn thing for you when you have it.

Re:Things that help with the flu.

[tgd]

I *always* used to get them, now, I don't since I started doing this about 7 years ago. Not once.

That's faith, not science.

I'd quote the rest of the items in your post, every single one of which was ridiculously incorrect, but... yeah, hardly seems worth it. Hopefully there isn't anyone else teetering on the edge of being a moron on Slashdot who reads any of it and follows you down that rabbit hole, though.

Re:Things that help with the flu.

[RoTNCoRE]

Citations please? Oh, right, there aren't any!

I think the directory structure of the links you provided are informative - opinions and ideas. Maybe eating that much garlic is preventative because those around you give you a wide berth...

Madagascar

[martijn hoekstra]

In response to the news, Madagascar closed down everything.

Want me to stay home when I'm sick?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then stop counting sick time in the same category as vacation.

movie "Contagion" realistic depiction

[peter303]

The 2011 movie Contagion was a little better than your standard apocalyptic movie in showing how a serious epidemic could bring down the world in about a month. Many similar movies like Outbreak and Andromeda Strain have deus-ex-machina endings of a quickie cure. But that is unlikely to be the case. Humanity has passed through anvil-type events before- plague, war, famine- where as many as 90% have perished. We've been lucky in modern society to have avoided these for so long.

cat flu

[WillgasM]

Seems every-damn-body's getting the flu this year. Everyone at work's been sick, and it seems to be the only thing people can talk about on my twitter feed. From reading the news, it seems to be a very "aggressive" strain going around this year. I've been in fairly close proximity to several of the stricken, and I've yet to even get the sniffles. Thinking back, I think I know why I seem to have developed the necessary antibodies: A few years ago, I was sitting outside my apartment on the sidewalk as I often like to do when it's drizzly out. Up walked this skinny, white stray cat. It didn't seem to mind the inclement weather and wasn't scared of me as are most of the strays. It sat down right beside me and rubbed it's head against my elbow. As I sat there and petted the filthy little malnourished cat, it coughed. I've never heard a cat cough like that. Not like hacking up a hairball, but like a full grown man with pneumonia or a daily smoker in their 50s. It kinda scared the crap out of me. I felt sorry for the little guy, but there wasn't much I could do. I went inside and promptly washed my hands and thought little more of it until the next morning when I had the aches, chills, and started running a mild fever. That was by far the worst case of the flu I had ever gotten. Despite feeling like death for about 3 days, I didn't go to the doctor. I kinda wish I had, because I'm fairly certain this had to be some crazy, previously unknown strain and it would've been cool to be patient zero. I stayed home a few days sleeping for inordinate amounts of time and popping vitamin C horse pills like they were candy until I recovered. I managed to not spread it to the population at large, which is good because I'm pretty sure it would've wiped out all the elderly and immunocompromised in the area. Since then, I've been fairly impervious to the flu. I mean, I haven't been tempting fate; licking the homeless or anything, but flu seasons have come and gone with no ill effect. I've shared confined spaces with the sick, even using the phone after them and such. When the swine flu panic swept through my part of the country, I all but tried to catch it with no luck. It seems as though I was exposed to some prehistoric alpha-influenza that left me with antibodies for every strain of the flu imaginable. Maybe that kitty had been playing down by the mammoth pit. Who knows? X-files shit.

THIS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, last week my GF came down with the flu - big time - but her work said she'd get a 'mark' on her record if she didn't show up for work (a retail job) the next day. I encouraged her to go, shaking with fever, sweating and all, and see her manager. I told her to walk straight up to her and ask if she'd gotten the flu shot yet.

Needless to say, she returned home an hour later and went straight to bed - no 'mark'. I hear this week that half her department is down with the sickness now... id10ts! :/

Follow up research

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see some follow up research into:

1) How many of these sick people actually have influenza (swab & lab)? Relying on "flu like symptoms" is not a valid way to do it.

2) How far the virus has drifted genetically? They go to manufacturing with their best guess as to which virus will become dominant in June/July usually. This being a very late outbreak has given the virus a lot more time to drift genetically rendering the vaccine a lot less than effective. To give an idea the folks at the Cochrane Collaboration reviewing the available research show that at best the flu vaccine will prevent 1 case of flu for every 40 people vaccinated IF the virus is an identical match to what is in the vaccine. It drops quickly to 1 case prevented for every 100 vaccinated in real world situations where the virus mutates.

3) How many of the people who actually have it (see #1) were vaccinated?

4) What are the blood levels of vitamin D3 of the people who actually have it (see #1)?

As a side note I hate it when people come in to work sick. I seriously hate it but can understand it. You got to pay the bills or a influenza bout will seem minor. So how about this for a plan. If you have to go to work and you know you are sick wear a mask. Maybe have the foreman/boss/supervisor give one to everyone who shows symptoms? Just an idea.

Flu, what flu?

[HHealthy]

It would be interesting to see which sectors encourage their sick workers to stay at home and which encourage then to still go to work. Of course, even more interesting would be to see the outcomes... For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.