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Fighting the Flu May Hurt Those Around You
sciencehabit writes "When you've got the flu, it can't hurt to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen to control the fever and make you feel better, right? Wrong, some scientists say. Lowering your body temperature may make the virus replicate faster and increase the risk that you transmit it to others. A new study claims that there are at least 700 extra influenza deaths in the United States every year because people suppress their fever."
You're fucked, but I feel better?
Dude, you are so fucked!
read about it in the last few years after one of my kids had an almost 105 fever one week
human pathogens like the 98.6 body temp and a fever is the body's natural way of fighting these pathogens
the flu virus also likes low humidity which is why people buy humidifiers in the winter time
unless my kid has some crazy high fever i try to avoid giving him tylenol or some other fever reducer as long as possible. usually until its almost time for bed
The histamine response has an actual infection-fighting purpose, so even though it also produces inconvenient/unpleasant side effects (runny nose, sneezing, etc.), it seems like it might not always be a good idea to suppress it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
No shit sherlock.
Fever is one of your body's ways to fight infection. When you supress it, you "enable the virus."
But I will take antipyretics when I damn well feel like it. Tough shit if someone else gets sick.
DARWIN, BABY!
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
Good thing that I got sick over my two weeks off for the winter holidays then!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Considering the population of the USA the percentage of the population killed each year by this is 0.00022300095%. On the other hand deaths for the flu have been as low as 3000 yearly so that's 23.3% of deaths. Still, the number of deaths compared to the population makes it comparable to winning the lottery in any case.
Yes, but sometimes it's over responsive. In this case, allergies. The only true long-term healthy solution to allergies is to physically move somewhere else; even if that means another city/state/country.
Or allergy tolerance shots. I get injected every week with a dose of what I am allergic to, in order to slowly build up my allergen tolerance and lower the amount of drugs I need to control my symptoms. It's to the point where I can now have pets!
With infections, I've always taken the approach of doing only as much symptom-relief as absolutely for my sanity/productivity/safety. Things like fever and coughing are part of the body's immune response, and letting them do their work will result in a faster recovery, so I'll put up with the discomfort and inconvenience.
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I think most people (myself included) take the meds for 'aches and pains' and to sleep. The fever gets suppressed as a byproduct of those meds. If there was some way to take meds to keep the fever without aching joints and a screaming headache that would be fine with me.
Exactly. For example, if you have a cold, the best medicine is Benadryl. Most of the symptoms of the cold are just an over reaction of your bodies imune system and you're basically having an allergic reaction to the virus. All the other over the counter cold medicines don't work very well and usually get you high as a kite. But the Benadryl almost always clears up my symptoms with nothing more than a little drowsiness.
I'm quite sure the larger contributing factor to the flu spreading is people going to work while sick, not a suppressed fever.
Much better approach would be creating a culture in the USA where its OK to stay home when sick.
But of course we can't do that, because SOCIALISM.
The immune system isn't usually that self-destructive.
Lupus FTFY. (I know, I know. "It's never lupus!")
Ok, so it is between ME dying of fever, or someone else.
That's a pretty easy choice to make...no?
Or you could do the right thing, and be considerate of others. Stay home, if you're sick. Take care of yourself; plus don't share your germs/virii/whatever.
#DeleteChrome
This may surprise a lot of people here, but in Germany the general rule is, if you get sick on vacation days and have a medical attestation prooving it, your affected (infected?) vacation days go back in your unused vacation.
Here's an idea.. Get sick, stay home! If you wan to medicate at home, knock yourself out. Just don't come to work and avoid going out in public.
Employers should be *actively* looking though their employees and sending home those who are sick. Have a fever? Go home. Don't come back until at least 24 hours w/o a fever. Take your laptop, work from home. Day Care's should have the *same* policy for workers and children, don't come in if you had a fever in the last 24 hours.
I'm serious, this *should* be a matter of law. I know that it won't fix everything, but it sure will slow down a virus if folks would be careful. I live with a person who has a compromised immune system. Getting a virus is a *serious* deal for us and may someday kill them. We have to be extremely careful and I just hate it when I have to deal with people who are obviously ill in public.
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Actually, it's not an allergic reaction on the virus. Allergic is a reaction if the target would be harmless to the body. But a virus is not, and the reaction is actually necessary. Suppressing the reaction thus means the virus is not attacked at all, or at least it is attacked with a reduced intensity. So while you might feel better with Benadryl, in fact you are in the same camp like the people who suppress the fever -- being sick longer, being contagious longer, and thus prolonging the flu waves.
Is the fever a side result of the effect of the virus on the organism ? Or is it a way for the organism to fight the virus and eliminate it ? Because we get fevers in most cases of severe infections and I doubt most germs are sensitive to a 3C increase in body temperature... I can still brew beer from anything like 10C to 40C...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This may surprise a lot of people in Germany, but in the US the general rule is, you don't have any vacation days and can't afford to take time off of work to see a doctor.
And if you do take time off of work to get well and figure out how to pay a doctor and any treatment they might suggest, it's entirely possible that, upon attempting to return to work, you find yourself jobless.
Therefore, again generally, we tend to take as many over-the-counter drugs as we can to begin feeling half-way human so we can keep working every day even if it kills us and those around us (which, according to TFA, it does).
Kid-proof tablet..
With an intact cough reflex you can't get post nasal drip in your lungs. The primary reason you get a bronchitis is 1) you didn't have a bronchitis (inflammation of the bronchioles, the larger airways of the lungs, you had a cough because of the drainage 2) the inflammation was viral and the nasty little proteinacous particle managed to scoot past the upper airway defenses or 3) the viral infection compromised the already compromised lining of the bronchioles (smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette) and allowed a bacterial infection to set up.
So the post nasal drip scenario isn't a good way to look at.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Funny, in North America, people get so few vacation/sick days that they feel they have to use up all of both. People will often call in sick when they really just want a vacation day. People think it's their duty to use up all their sick days, whether they are actually sick or not. And then they wonder why the quota for sick days is so low....
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This article is brought to you by Benadryl, American's number one cold medication!
Seriously though it's not that brilliant, just the best that they trust you with.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If someone takes medicine to lower a fever but stays at home until he/she is better then nobody else gets the flu. Yet people who get sick feel compelled to go to work because of work ethics or pressure from employers, and they expose everyone who is on the train/bus with them, or in the line at Starbucks. Surely the message should not be "if you take asprin you're killing people", but "stay home until you're better"!
When sick, if I have a fever I only deal with it if it gets any higher than 101F. That way the fever does what it's supposed to and I avoid delerium and death. This was the advice my Doctor gave for my children and I figure if It's good enough for a toddler it's good enough for me.
> People think it's their duty to use up all their sick days
That is the effect of setting a quota. In civilised countries you get as many sick days as your health requires.
The quota for sick days is low because there's not much respect for working people by people that are getting rich off of them. It gets better the higher up the payscale you go (particularly in an office environment, where they've finally figured out that one person coming in sick means having dozens of people sick and underperforming for weeks on end while the infection runs its course) but it's still a problem that needs to be managed.
People work better when they're healthy and well rested, and people that are healthy and well rested tend to stay that way.
I don't know many people that call in sick for vacation days; we don't actually have an allotment of days at my office. You're just expected to tell people that you're sick so the work can be taken care of, take care of yourself, and come back as soon as is reasonable. But I'm a Canadian in Canada. It's been like this more or less my entire professional life.
"Things like fever and coughing are part of the body's immune response,"
But not necessarily effective ones. If your lungs are irritated, you cough, whether or not there is something that needs to be expelled. Worse, extensive coughing can cause irritation, which leads to even more coughing.
If you are coughing up mucus, take an expectorant to decrease the viscosity of said mucus (e.g. bromhexine, acetylcysteine) and make the coughing more effective.
If it's a nonproductive dry cough, you should don't hesitate to take an anti-tussitive (cough suppressant), e.g. codeine, noscapine, dextromethorfan.
There's also a theory that common cold symptoms are an allergic reaction that's best suppressed with 1st-generation antihistamines. At least, runny nose and coughing don't expel the virus which is multiplying IN YOUR BODY CELLS.
Disclaimer: I am not an M.D..
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I guess Obamacare will make aspirin illegal now as a preventative action.
That's the least of it. It will destroy our civilization and lead to Stalinism. I know that's true because I've read it on right-wing web sites.
When you are sick, you are sick. There is no such thing as a sick day bank. Of course, you need medical attestation. In 2012, I had a pneumonia. The doctor wrote me sick 3 weeks. So I had 3 weeks to recover.
Of course, if you are sick too often, your boss might have a talk with you, to see if the working conditions are having a negative effect on your health.
Thats for big companies. In smaller companies with few employees its difficult and a bit tricky, but the general guidelines are the same.
Fevers don't kill people.
That is nonsense.
Your fever can go up to roughly 44 celsius, around that temperature you die.
The fever wasn't what caused the problems
Yes, the fever can be the cause of the problem, I sugget to read at least the basics about medicine before writing such nonsense. Simple info: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What...
More complex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
(And I really wonder: it is something you learn in school in latest 4th grade, how can an adult not know the basis about fever?)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh, bull. If you really believed that, you'd move to Germany.
This may surprise a lot of people here, but in Germany the general rule is, if you get sick on vacation days and have a medical attestation prooving it, your affected (infected?) vacation days go back in your unused vacation.
I like this part of Germany, but I don't like another part. You're required to go to the doctor if you're sick to get a slip of paper saying you're excused. For me, without a car, that means getting on a bus and / or train and spreading my germs and being out in the cold weather at the absolute worst time to be out in it. People get sicker when they are out in the weather. Been there. Done that.
thats more than all the people who've been shot by "crazy" spree shooters in the past 3 decades.
I wonder if congress is going to make a big campaign about this like they do banning guns.
Both of my boys have had febrile seizures and stopped breathing. This usually doesn't cause any problems, but is the scariest thing I've ever gone through. In the case of my youngest son, though, he turned grey, stopped breathing, and didn't start back on his own. Luckily, my mother-in-law was there and knew how to do rescue breaths on him until the paramedics arrived. He was hospitalized so they could figure out why he didn't start breathing again. He's had multiple febrile seizures since then and every time he gets a fever we give him medicine to get it under control quickly.
Did this kill him? No, but without the rescue breaths my mother-in-law administered this story could have had a much different ending.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Most people can't afford to be out sick for a week or more.
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so since you have spread the infection for one day, before you were showing symptoms, you might as well go ahead and spread it for several more days afterwards?
horsehockey. one day worth of germs 3 days worth of germs.
stay at home when you are sick.