<p>I’m sure that modern medical treatments could have saved some of those who died in 1918, but that pandemic was definitely different - far deadlier than any other season flu outbreak. Heck, the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, for which most modern antibiotics were available, still killed 34,000 people in the US that year. I got the Hong Kong flu that year. It definitely was NOT like the other cases of flu I’ve had over the years. I missed nearly three weeks of school. And for about a week of it I’d sit in bed with saliva drooling out of my mouth, because my throat was so sore that I avoided the pain of swallowing at all costs. And bad as it was, Hong Kong flu was mild compared to the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918.</p>
<p>I do get the flu shot every year. Some years, I do get the pain in my upper arm.
I also stay up to date with my other shots (and my parents make sure I do). I also had allergy shots, which was three shots once a week for a year, then once a month for three more years.
None of this has ever decreased my mental ability in any way.
None of that means that I want the flu!
H1N1 is the same as swine flu.
Secondary infections could mean asthma (anything that weakens the respiratory system) or something like HIV that weakens the immune system. It’s not necessarily a bacteria that can be treated with antibiotics.
I believe (not 100% sure) that getting a flu shot and getting the flu virus will provide the same permanent immunity. Let’s say you get the flu shot one year, and you would have gotten the virus instead if you didn’t. Years later, a similar flu comes around that you would have immunity for if you got the virus. Instead, you got the shot but since it provided the immunity for the virus that one year, and since they’re similar, it also provides the immunity for this virus this year. The reason that new flu shots are released every year is because the flu is different every year (same reason there is no shot for the common cold), not because your immunity wears off. Again, I’m not 100% sure of this, but I think that if your immunity from the shot would wear off (which I don’t think it does) it would wear off just as quickly if you had the virus instead.
EDIT: Apparently I’m wrong about that - the CDC says that immunity from the vaccine can wane over time. I think that immunity from the virus would wane just as quickly, but I’m not sure.</p>
<p>Agreed, I am not sure on how long the immunity from an actual flu bout lasts vs. vaccine. But I had read somewhere that the vaccine immunity does fade over time. Still, I figure I am statistically improving my family’s chances, as I said above. My theory is that this is just another form of natural selection – those who couldn’t be bothered/had some mistaken idea that the shot was bad for them/didn’t have health insurance or couldn’t afford the shots are not going to have as good a chance of surviving the next flu pandemic. Of course, it is possible it might be some strain that all of this won’t help with. But I do what I can that is within my control. And if the short run benefit is that we don’t get whacked with “regular” influenza again, I am also happy with that.</p>
<p>I am one of those with a weakened immune system who is supposed to get the shots first when there’s a shortage (even though I’m 20). I got them every year until the time I was 16 and they made absolutely no difference- I got sick because of the shot and I still managed to get some type of flu. So I finally gave up about my junior year of high school (the season of H1N1- which I ended up getting TWICE even though they said it was impossible- was the last year I got the vaccine). While I still got the flu every year like clockwork, I now only get sick once because I don’t get sick from the shot. I’m going to hold out as long as I can until I get another one.</p>
<p>romanigypsyeyes, are you sure you have had true influenza every time? Lots of people call things “flu” that aren’t influenza. Also, while a few people have reactions to the shot, it typically is not nearly as severe as actual influenza (which has laid me and my kids out flat for a week every time).</p>
<p>It depends. It depends on both the disease and the vaccine. If getting the disease makes you immune, then then it is usually possible to make a vaccine that will do it about as well. Sometimes they don’t know enough and end up making a vaccine that doesn’t have quite all the same proteins on its surface and so the immunity in confers is incomplete and/or fades faster than if you had caught the disease. This is what happened years ago with the first chicken pox vaccines. They ended up with a bunch of adults who had been vaccinated as children suddenly coming down with chicken pox after the vaccine immunity faded. The vaccines they have now are much better.</p>
<p>Sometimes the vaccine confers immunity even better than catching the disease does. Some flu vaccines can do this. This is partly due to the enhancers that are added to the vaccine to boost the immune response beyond what the simple virus would stimulate, and partly because they design the vaccine to protect against more than one strain of influenza virus. But catching flu will induce immunity only to the specific strain that you caught.</p>
<p>The reason why it’s possible to catch some diseases over and over again, and why vaccines don’t work very well or at all, is that the virus mutates very rapidly. In those cases the virus no longer “looks like” the same virus at the molecular level. So your immune system is all primed to look for one set of proteins on the surface of the virus but finds itself confronted with a different one.</p>
<p>The classic example of this is HIV. It mutates more than 100 times faster than the next fastest virus (which is flu), and thus in more than 30 years of effort has not yet produced an effective HIV vaccine. </p>
<p>The classic virus that mutates very slowly is small pox. That’s why both immunity from the disease or the vaccine works so well and lasts so long. With influenza virus it’s another story. The vaccine makers struggle desperately to stay one step ahead of the virus. They change the vaccine every year to try to keep up with the mutations. Some years they succeed pretty well and the vaccine is quite effective, and other years they misjudge or the vaccine throws a curve ball. In those years lots of people get the flu in spite of having had the vaccine.</p>
<p>This is quite true. The classic example of this is the “stomach flu.” There is no such thing as the stomach flu. In humans, influenza is a disease of the lungs, not the stomach. You may well have come down with some viral infection of the stomach, but it ain’t the flu. A rotavirus maybe.</p>
<p>A lot of what people call “the flu” is often just a bad cold. Both are respiratory diseases and share some of the same symptoms. But a cold is to true influenza what a kitty cat is to a mountain lion. With a bad cold you can, with some effort, tough it out and drag yourself out of bed and go to work or school anyway. With real influenza you aren’t going anywhere. You are so sick that you are going to stay right there in your bed, at least until the worst part is over.</p>
<p>True, but… If you refuse to get a flu shot, better do a swab test and determine if any of your family members, especially any young kiddos (under 21) are staph or MRSA carriers. Yes, antibiotics can clear these, but… when the organism is weakened by a second punch such as the flu, even antibiotics were powerless:</p>
<p>In a pandemic situation, I’d prefer not to need to seek treatment (even if it was for flu with a secondary infection of some kind). The health care system could really clog up with a lot of people seeking care, and it could be harder to get testing or treatment.</p>
<p>Got a flu shot for DS2. We were at the ped office getting his second HPV vaccine so I figured we might as well do both! Missing high school these days is dreadful! It’s so difficult to get all the missed assignments done and returned in the allotted time - so much better to stay healthy and stay in school.</p>
<p>This year’s flu shot includes the H1N1 strain, which caused the pandemic a couple of years ago and is still out there.</p>
<p>H1N1 was not a false alarm. Although it did not cause a pandemic of 1918 proportions, it did make a lot of people sick and kill some of them – including young people. My daughter was a college student at the time, and two students at her school died of H1N1 or its complications. And so many got sick that the college asked professors to waive attendance requirements and make it possible for students to make up all types of work – even labs – so that sick students wouldn’t feel that they need to go to class (where they would spread the virus). The college also had its Greek houses suspend all parties for a couple of weeks to help decrease flu transmission among students.</p>
<p>I read a fascinating book about the 1918 influenza pandemic. When it first began to circulate, it was a typical flu virus. As it made its way around the globe, it mutated into something horrifyingly virulent. The typical fatality associated with the 1918 virus was not your usual victim. They were young and healthy, for the most part. What happened was that in people with vigorous, healthy immune systems, there was an overreaction of the immune system to the virus, which flooded the lungs with fluid. These deaths usually occurred within a very short time frame. The immune system cascade was not something you could treat with antibiotics. You might be able to give the patients immunosuppressants or steroids, but these usually take a while to kick in. The immune reaction noted in 1918 was very quick. </p>
<p>I, too, had thought that with today’s antibiotics, a 1918 flu pandemic would not be possible. Reading in depth about it cured me of that notion. </p>
<p>The book I read is available from amazon. It is titled *The Great Influenza *by John M. Barry and was a fascinating read.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4, I think I heard that the 1918 flu virus became so bad primarily because it infected the WWI soldiers packed into the trenches, which caused it to mutate into a form particularly dangerous to that type of host?</p>
<p>^^^^I know that being crammed into trenches with one another probably enabled the virus to spread, but I don’t know whether or not it contributed to its virulent mutation.</p>
<p>From what I read, soldiers who were only mildly ill were kept in the field. Those who were sicker were sent out to infirmaries or other locations. Traveling in trains, these sicker individuals were carrying a more virulent organism out into the communities, enabling the more dangerous form of the virus to take hold outside of the war zone.</p>
<p>The immune system overreaction is called a “cytokine storm.”</p>