What Is The Truth About The H1n1 Flu?

[headscan]

http://www.calgaryherald.com/health/Calgar...1628/story.html

 

People already being turned away from the clinics and the province is only getting 90,000 out of the 200,000 doses it expected next week. Wonder when the first riot will start? And yes Rick, if there is any sort of "incident" in the lineups I will blame it on the media and they'll deserve it.

[ÜberFly]

I guess one could always put on some grubby clothes and go to the Mustard Seed or Drop-in Centre (in Calgary) if they don't want to wait in line at one of the 4/5 other clinics!! Talk about an (un)ethical debate/decision!!

 

P

 

I don't understand how the homeless are able to get their vaccinations before the high risk groups who want to get it who are forced to wait in 6+ hour lines...especially with the shortage of vaccinations right now.

 

Who pays the taxes in this situation?

[Castuserraticus]

I used to live in hurricane country. Any time the government recommended or ordered an evacuation and the hurricane didn't come, it was because the stupid government overreacted and the media over hyped it. Any time the government recommended/ordered an evacuation and the hurricane did come and people get stuck in the path, the stupid government ordered the evacuation too late and the morons in the media did not do enough to get the word out. Oh, and anyone who did not leave and got stuck in their damn house had to be rescued-on the taxpayer dime.

 

Seems to me the gov/media can't win no matter what they do. No matter the outcome it's their fault. Much the same about this flu thing. Depending on the story you read or person you talk to, the gov either is over reacting, under planning, or both. The the media is creating hysteria by reporting the story. I can promise you that no matter the outcome, it will be the media or governments fault. They are easy and convenient targets. Not saying they are not sometimes at fault, I am saying they aren't always at fault.

 

And while I do certainly acknowledge their are worse things happening right now than H1N1, to say that the money would be better spent elsewhere is specious. The money spent on vaccines would never be set aside for some other reason, particularly charities in other countries. It is not the governments responsibility to take care of Africa, as horrible as that may sound. It's the governments responsibility to take care of us. If we want to impact starvation somewhere else, it is up to us to contribute to that. And I do by the way, it is an extremely worthwhile cause.

 

Quit trying to stop all the fun. A balanced view has no place in this thread.

 

And now back to open-minded discussion....

[headscan]

H1N1 vaccine shortage feared; people turned away at clinics

 

Temperatures rise as 'flu rage' explodes across Canada

 

Those are the headlines on the Herald's website. No fear mongering and hype there.

[reevesr1]

I'll call them and ask them to stop all reporting. That will help. No information is better than hyped information. Just who do those newspaper guys think they are trying to stay alive in a news right now world?

 

First line from the first link:

 

All five of Calgary's H1N1 clinics are closed until Saturday morning, Alberta's Health Minister confirmed this afternoon.

 

Wouldn't want to know that!

[headscan]

The problem is the headlines they use. If you read the flu rage article it becomes apparent that it's far from "exploding across Canada". Most people don't read beyond the headlines. Something to do with our quick-fix attention deficit culture.

 

I do a lot of media interviews - probably well over 100 so far this year alone - and they want to know the bad stuff, not the good because that's what attracts readers/viewers. I've seen my own words misquoted or taken out of context to satisfy the writer's story angle as well. Relaying accurate information is one thing, but using sensational and possibly misleading headlines to draw people doesn't help anyone. I know the Herald (and all of CanWest Global) is hurting badly for money, but that's no excuse.

 

Also note that my condemnation of the reporting doesn't reflect my view on the vaccine. I was planning on leaving the office early today to get my shot until I heard about the closures (through a coworker, not the Herald).

[Justfreewheelin]

well everyone can come over to my place and get the real thing, then you do not have to get the shot. sounds good.

[rehsifylf]

I just got finished from the ICU where there are several patients on ventilators at present - a very rare event in any given year, let alone for the age group of patients (none have grey hair). I

 

What - you're telling me that it's not just old people dying? Now I get it. I mean, its one thing when geezers are dropping like flies - but healthy people, thats a different story.

 

To Terry H and sarcastic rickr- you missed my points badly so I'll state them more clearly. I never argued that people should not get the flu shot - I even said I get the Flu shot every year - this year will be no different. I don't support the arguments for not getting a shot. As for efficacy - don't you find it surprising that everyone is arguing about whether you should get a shot and even its staunchest proponents (including those on the board) have no idea how effective it is? The predominat position on the boards suggest that if you get the shot you won't get sick (and therefore clog the hospital lines). BTW - anyone been in the past week? It is a complete gong show, more so than usual. Sorry - I think the media focus on this has made things worse in the short term.

 

Long term it may help. However - this was a brilliant move by the media. Every year, and I mean every year - the hospitals in Toronto and elsewhere have huge issues with patients dying in ambulances or being turned away. The real reason for this is "The Ontario Hospital Association said that the issue is province wide. On any given day, 2,800 patients who should be in nursing homes or at their own houses take up beds unnecessarily and this leads to about 680 patients waiting for beds that aren't available. " That will happen again this year. However, this year the government and the media can blame the issue on people not getting a flu shot. Well done to them and to those of you that will buy it.

 

 

My points/opinions in my last post were just this:

 

1) This year is no different from any other year in Canada other than the media has gone to town on this one IMO. Its true the government then had no choice but to climb on board. Your medical friends were right Terry - people have died from the Flu this year. Just need to find me any lay person (outside of Edmonton) that wouldn't have made the same prediction, and Ill congratulate them. People die every year, but as our compassionate resident forum doctor said in his post, this year is worse because not all the people dying have grey hair (grey haired people are still more important than Africans, though, right?).

 

2) People that bring up the deaths of two teenagers as the rationale for this being a more important issue this year. I merely brought up the fact that if protecting children from dying is the important issue, then we could do far more good spending the money on establishing clean water and agriculture in Africa (unless the lives of 5M African children are less important of a few hundred Canadian children). BTW - people in Calgary are doing just (helping to provide clean water and agriculture in Africa). Rickr - if it is not our government's job to help in Africa, then why do we (pretend to) do it? Could it be that all foreign policy is just to appease our guilt and in the end benefit us, not them? I agree wholeheartedly.

[TerryH]

rehsifylf, I'm getting tired of this thread, so I'll leave you with the last word. Discussing this issue with some people is best summed up by the following:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/cool-han...cate/1606299045

[loviatt]

rehsifylf,

make no mistake about my comments regarding the age of the patients dying. My comments are expressing the fact that this year's flu is not like the typical seasonal flu which does wipe out hundreds of people yearly, most of them elderly with numerous comorbid conditions like emphysema, congestive heart failure etc. The flu this year isn't affecting those elderly patients with little physiologic reserve, rather, it is hitting the young and healthy population very severely - those which in regular seasonal flu years would stay home from school or work for 5 days and then be back at full strength thereafter. But thanks for misinterpreting my provision of information to those on the forum as a suggestion that i am ageist. 90% of my patient population is over age 60, and I do my darndest to provide the best medical care that your tax money can provide to each of them. Even the misinformed ones.

[headscan]

rehsifylf, I'm getting tired of this thread, so I'll leave you with the last word. Discussing this issue with some people is best summed up by the following:

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/cool-han...cate/1606299045

Great. Now I need to watch Cool Hand Luke again soon.

 

Now here's the question for unscientific and mvdaog. There are some pretty ridiculous lineups for the shot and not all of us have had time to stand in one of them. So what are we supposed to do to keep from catching it in the meantime? Yeah, I know about washing your hands regularly and using hand sanitizers, but this is airborne too right? In the next two weeks I'll be flying to Ottawa, Mexico City, Toronto, and LA and I'd really like to do everything I can to minimize my risk.

[jonny5]

Don't bite your nails and don't pick you nose, and that should help.

 

 

[Justfreewheelin]

Don't bite your nails and don't pick you nose, and that should help.

 

oh well that is where I went wrong.

[headscan]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/all/1

 

Just finished reading this article. Really good and worth a read. As a warning it has lots of words that make sense instead of emotional rhetoric.

[mvdaog]

theres so many variables unique to each person its really tough to say what to do or not do to stay flu free. All I can say confidently is there's not a ton of good evidence on what actually helps outside of vaccinations. It would only be what my common sense beliefs are, much like what the 'naturalists' believe helps, like keeping in good physical shape with exercise, eating healthy foods for the meantime, keeping the vitamins topped up, keeping stress levels low in life (i.e. fishing as much you can). But - who knows if that really helps. I dont see how it would hurt. But honestly I think it's just the luck of the draw - some people seem to get the flu more often than others for reasons I dont know.

[jonny5]

oh well that is where I went wrong.

 

Especially in that order...

[reevesr1]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/all/1

 

Just finished reading this article. Really good and worth a read. As a warning it has lots of words that make sense instead of emotional rhetoric.

 

Headline is a bit sensational......(gay pokey thing here)

 

A couple of quotes:

 

 

Still, despite peer-reviewed evidence, many parents ignore the math and agonize about whether to vaccinate. Why? For starters, the human brain has a natural tendency to pattern-match — to ignore the old dictum “correlation does not imply causation” and stubbornly persist in associating proximate phenomena. If two things coexist, the brain often tells us, they must be related. Some parents of autistic children noticed that their child’s condition began to appear shortly after a vaccination. The conclusion: “The vaccine must have caused the autism.” Sounds reasonable, even though, as many scientists have noted, it has long been known that autism and other neurological impairments often become evident at or around the age of 18 to 24 months, which just happens to be the same time children receive multiple vaccinations. Correlation, perhaps. But not causation, as studies have shown.

 

nd if you need a new factoid to support your belief system, it has never been easier to find one. The Internet offers a treasure trove of undifferentiated information, data, research, speculation, half-truths, anecdotes, and conjecture about health and medicine. It is also a democratizing force that tends to undermine authority, cut out the middleman, and empower individuals. In a world where anyone can attend what McCarthy calls the “University of Google,” boning up on immunology before getting your child vaccinated seems like good, responsible parenting. Thanks to the Internet, everyone can be their own medical investigator.

 

The bottom line: Pseudo-science preys on well-intentioned people who, motivated by love for their kids, become vulnerable to one of the world’s oldest professions. Enter the snake-oil salesman.

 

But researchers, alas, can’t respond with the same forceful certainty that the doubters are able to deploy — not if they’re going to follow the rules of science. Those tenets allow them to claim only that there is no evidence of a link between autism and vaccines. But that phrasing — what sounds like equivocation — is just enough to allow doubts to not only remain but to fester.

 

According to science journalist Michael Specter, author of the new book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives, the controversy surrounding vaccine safety has made lack of expertise a requirement when choosing members of prominent advisory panels on the issue. “It’s shocking,” Specter says. “We live in a country where it’s actually a detriment to be an expert about something.” When expertise is diminished to such an extent, irrationality and fear can run amok.

 

And he wants Americans to be fully educated about risk and not hoodwinked into thinking that dropping vaccines keeps their children safe. “The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,” he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’

 

Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

 

In 19th-century England, he explains, Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was known to be effective. But despite the Compulsory Vaccination Act of 1853, many people still refused to take it, and thousands died unnecessarily. “That was the birth of the anti-vaccine movement,” he says, adding that then — as now — those at the forefront “were great at mass marketing. It was a print-oriented society. They were great pamphleteers. And by the 1890s, they had driven immunization rates down to the 20 percent range.”

 

Immediately, smallpox took off again in England and Wales, killing 1,455 in 1893. Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “didn’t have any anti-vaccine movement and had very high immunization rates and very little incidence of smallpox disease and death,” he says, taking a breath. “You’d like to think we would learn.”

 

Offit wants the book to be cinematic, visually riveting. He believes, fervently, that if he can hook people with a good, truthful story, maybe they will absorb his hopeful message: The human race has faced down this kind of doubt before.

 

His battle is, in at least one respect, probably a losing one. There will always be more illogic and confusion than science can fend off. Offit’s idea is to inoculate people one by one, until the virus of fear, if not fully erased, at least recedes.

 

I greatly enjoyed that. I hope, a hope almost sure to be unfulfilled, that some of the doubters of the effectiveness of vaccines will read this and be intrigued and question the whole anti-vaccine movement. But as the last quoted paragraphs state more eloquently than I can, this is unlikely.

 

Thanks Marc.

[snuffy]

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience/all/1

 

Just finished reading this article. Really good and worth a read. As a warning it has lots of words that make sense instead of emotional rhetoric.

 

 

Good article. As for the debate concerning the efficacy of the vaccine, there has been work done to demonstrate it. However, when it comes to public health, you can't prove a positive. If everyone gets vaccinated and noone dies, the perception will be that the threat was overhyped.

 

We run up against a uniquely modern mindset: whoever heard of young, healthy people getting sick and dying? It's unthinkable in our modern age. But 100 years ago, smallpox running through the village and wiping out half the population was not uncommon. Hell, my Dad spent time in the polio wards in Edmonton a mere 50 years ago and has been bilaterally paralysed by post-polio syndrome starting in middle age. Now that there's no wards, we have people running around concocting dangers for the Salc vaccine and warning parents about them! I love to arrange a trade.

[LynnF]

Well good luck to the rest of you who aren't high risk and want a shot. The government has SHUT DOWN the clinics now until Tuesday and will be screening out for high-risk candidates only. That's what they should have done in the first place. What an idiotic mess.

[canadensis]

rehsifylf,

make no mistake about my comments regarding the age of the patients dying. My comments are expressing the fact that this year's flu is not like the typical seasonal flu which does wipe out hundreds of people yearly, most of them elderly with numerous comorbid conditions like emphysema, congestive heart failure etc. The flu this year isn't affecting those elderly patients with little physiologic reserve, rather, it is hitting the young and healthy population very severely - those which in regular seasonal flu years would stay home from school or work for 5 days and then be back at full strength thereafter. But thanks for misinterpreting my provision of information to those on the forum as a suggestion that i am ageist. 90% of my patient population is over age 60, and I do my darndest to provide the best medical care that your tax money can provide to each of them. Even the misinformed ones.

 

well it is a bloody shame that the decision makers did not figure out that the "high risk" individuals should get the vaccines first. I went to 2 clinics friday to be turned away. I have asthma, so according to Health Alberta I should be 3rd in line "chronic illness"

 

Seems they are unwrapping the new plan Monday morning on how th get remaining vaccines to those that needed it all along, the high risk individuals. The whole plan seems bass ackwards, if you can call any of it a "plan"

 

Let's build up the demand for the vaccine for months via the media, now we have the vaccine so lets open 4 places to get it for over 1 million people, once we get the vaccine let it be a free for all until we nearly run out of vaccine, then we will ration the remaining vaccine to the high risk individuals??? Oh ya, sorry you are high risk but you cannot get it from your family doctor???

 

Really the whole thing is a comedy of errors.

[midgetwaiter]

well it is a bloody shame that the decision makers did not figure out that the "high risk" individuals should get the vaccines first. I went to 2 clinics friday to be turned away. I have asthma, so according to Health Alberta I should be 3rd in line "chronic illness"

 

I think it's worth pointing out that Alberta was the only province that chose not to prioritize vaccine delivery for individuals that are in higher risk groups. I would really like an explanation for that from the provincial gov.

 

I was back at work today for the first time since Oct 23 because I was sick with what is almost certainly this flu. My GF's students had several confirmed cases and we got sick at the same time, her father has since been confirmed. I never got sick enough to need the ER but it was a near thing for a couple days. So I can't say I definitely had it but there isn't much doubt. I change 0s into 1s for a living so I'm not going to to pretend I have facts to present but I'll tell you it was a unique experience for me. The symptoms were just like any old flu but much worse than usual, I don't recall ever being that disoriented and just plain sick before. I lost 14 pounds, I had entire conversations with people at work over the phone that I can't recall. I spent 9 days stuck in the house.

 

In contrast the girlfriend was stuffed up and had a sore throat for a couple days and that was it. I guess of you get it mild you're lucky but I can surely see how this could go badly for someone that was not otherwise healthy.

 

I would have gone for the shot but come Monday morning I was already sick.

 

 

 

[Guest Sundancefisher]

A recent US study showed very clearly that the mortality rate from this flu is way lower than normal seasonal flu. The panick generated has not been fair to the public. I was going to get it if easily available just cause it was going around the community...but I have absolutely no problem letting the elderly, pregnant women, small children, handicapped kids and adults, sick kids and adults (cancer wards etc.), chronically ill, people with respiratory problems and hockey players take my shot instead. It there is left overs...have someone give me a call. I will probably be out ice fishing then.

 

Cheers

 

Sun

[SupremeLeader]

If you have no expertise, then don't offer it on an internet board.

Smitty

 

 

....Are you serious?

 

I'll remember that.

[Smitty]

....Are you serious?

 

I'll remember that.

 

Yes, please do.

 

I'd hate to have to explain it to you, I can't find the diagrams.

 

Smitty

[Guest Sundancefisher]

 

Too late for me. I caught it now... When most of the community is infected...I was just a sitting duck.