Still on the Quest

Excellently well put.

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browngirl.livejournal.com

Well said!

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goldvermilion87.livejournal.com

I HAVE THE SAME RANT ALL THE TIME

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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blamebrampton.livejournal.com

I got out of whack with 2011's flu shot due to having been travelling the year before and so getting one in October, which was great for the Northern Hemisphere and for H1N1 but rubbish for the 2011 Sydney season. Naturally, I caught it, because I was flying a lot that year and on a lot of buses and trains, and it seems I ALWAYS catch respiratory viruses. Ghastly, revolting, and post-viral asthma.

Went for the 2012 shot and my mad doctor said 'Oh, you're not in any of the high-risk groups …' I had to point out my three or four doses of flu in the last 10 years and nagging post-viral cough and asthma after each, plus loads of colds. To which he replied 'What is it with you and snot?'

I really need a more sensible doctor …

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I agree for every other vaccination, but not flu. I'm not a high risk person, and I work behind the scenes of medicine in a lab. If I were frontline staff coming into contact with vulnerable patients ever day, then sure I would take the shot. But seeing as I don't, I don't really want to take the gamble on whatever strain of flu might possibly come my way seeing as the side-effects from the vaccine seem to be worse than others. We don't have herd immunity in the UK as the vaccine is only offered to health professionals and those at risk, so it's only my own chance of getting flu I'm gambling with.

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I've had the flu and I've had a bad reaction to a flu shot (once) and of the two, I'd take having the reaction again, thanks. It only lasted for one day. The flu lasted for weeks and I didn't feel right again for two months.

And are you telling me they didn't offer flu vaccinations to everyone even during the swine flu scare of a few years ago? Although if you're in a lab and in contact with people who are in a lot of contact with sick people, I would think you'd want the extra bit of protection.

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Nope, no universal vaccination during swine flu - I'm not sure one was developed in time anyway. I was one of the unlucky ones who went down with swine flu actually. They just gave us all tamiflu if we caught it. Most have been good stuff because I was only really ill for a couple of weeks, and the really awful feverish bit was only a few days. Anecdata! but I've known people to have to take more than one day off of work because of the flu vaccine, so I'd rather take my chances. Well, that and not really wanting to pay for the vaccination (only free to those at risk). At the risk of sounding like a massive arse I never get the colds or pukes that go around the lab, so I don't worry. The vaccination doesn't have enough penetration in the UK to confer herd immunity, so it's not like my being carrier or not has any benefit to the immunocompromised.

I find the whole vaccination thing quite funny really. Clearly vaccines are badass interventions which have enabled some pretty nasty things to get wiped out. Horay for no more polio wards! But I find people's reactions to the idea of vaccination really vary by culture. When researching a dissertation on the anti-vaccination lobby for school, I was shocked to discover that the US routinely vaccinate for chicken pox. Over here that's considered a mild no-big-deal childhood disease. I had it when I was three, and I guess the fact that I remember it suggests it was pretty unpleasant (I don't remember it being painful though, weirdly I thought it was cool). When I read the US pamphlets on the subject though I was pretty surprised to see it described in the same language used by measles pamphlets over here. Measles (due to my culture?) I see as a really serious disease that we've got to protect kids against, not a vague childhood rite of passage.

Sorry, babbling now. People's attitudes towards vaccination are really interesting to me.

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It's not just you, you know--it's every person you come in contact with--in shops, on public transportation, who held a door for you or vice versa--that you could be protecting. There might not be general herd immunity, but as a public health matter vaccines--all vaccines--have a multiplier effect.

Edited Date: 2013-01-15 02:58 pm (UTC)

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I see what you're saying, for example I go crazy on hand-washing despite the general population not bothering. But I think if something is endemic then really nothing less than herd immunity makes a difference to the stranger in the street. The % vaccination required is pretty high. I don't have my hard drive with me, but could pull out the figures when I get home, if you're interested?

With an overloaded heathcare system like the NHS you've got to do a cost-risk-benefit assessment. All those vaccinations cost money that's got to come from another department. I think they made the right decision here.

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Well, for the at-risk populations (babies, seniors), I'd think flu vaccine is plenty high-risk as to be necessary. For the working population...well, many (if not most) US companies have assessed that the cost of having workers out sick for weeks is so expensive as to make annual flu vaccines well worth paying for, either by providing free vaccines at the workplace or by paying for health care coverage that covers the full cost of the vaccines. I'm surprised UK employers haven't made the same decision.

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Well, UK employers don't fund healthcare. Full stop.

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And they'd be the ones trying to operate with a substantial percentage of workers flatly unable to work, if there's a particularly bad flu year. Won't affect me!

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It's just a different system. I think we'd find it weird and intrusive if our employers got all up in our healthcare.

Actually, tell a lie, when I worked for the Medical Research Council they offered me the jab (but they are government so you get TONS of benefits that most people don't). I turned it down, because weird. A guy I worked with got it, and then was off sick for a week. Anecdata clearly that proves nothing, just find it kinda ironic.

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The reason I was trying to get people to go get a shot (and it was being offered for free) is because we've had ten times the number of flu cases this year as we did last year. And twenty deaths, one of them a child under the age of 6.

Some people do have a bad reaction to vaccinations, but as my father (who was a pandemiologist) pointed out, if you got the flu the day after the shot, you already had it, it just hadn't incubated yet.

He and my grandmother once had a long talk in my presence about the 1918 flu pandemic. She could remember it. "You heard that someone was sick in the morning and by afternoon they were dead." That was in Montana, by the way. In other places it hit even harder. That particular strain killed more people in their twenties and thirties than it did seniors and children, and it left a lot of orphans behind. It also may have been the cause of or contributor to the sleeping sickness epidemic which followed on its heels. If getting a flu shot helps me avoid encephalitis lethargica (http://www.mollycrosby.com/book_asleep.html) then I'm definitely going to take the flu shot every year.

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"The reason I was trying to get people to go get a shot (and it was being offered for free) is because we've had ten times the number of flu cases this year as we did last year. And twenty deaths, one of them a child under the age of 6."

Well, that's certainly information worth knowing to understand your frustration. If we'd been hearing in the media over about rising flu deaths and a shot was offered to me free, that would change my mind into taking it. But like I say, it's all pertussis at the moment. And norovirus, for which there's no vaccine.

Of course if you have the flu straight after the shot then you must have been incubating it for a few days! ;-)

I don't understand the significance of the flu being Montana, sorry.

The Spanish flu was a terrible disaster. :-( Killed more people than the Black Death, right? Would be interested if your Dad had ventured any opinion as to whether it could happen again? Obviously in 1918 there were a certain set of circumstances that (thank God) we are unlikely to ever see again.

There was a brilliant film a year or so ago about a similar pandemic. I can't remember the name, but it starred Kate Winslet. I'm no epidemiologist, but it had some of the soundest science I've ever seen in a film!

As to encephalitis... well, there are much higher chances of me killing myself and others every time I take my car out on the road. I've done my time as a shivering wreck unable to leave the house due to anxiety and panic. I try not to let freak chance control me anymore. Please understand that doesn't mean I'm trying to say your choice to minimise that risk for yourself is wrong! It just isn't the kind of thing that would change my mind.

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My dad's view was that when it came to the 1918 flu, the question wasn't "if" but "when" we'd see it again. Of course, what he SAID he really wanted to be able to do then was to vaccinate every chicken in SEAsia and China, to break the link there. (Joke, officers, for the use of.)

Montana, in 1918, was a very low population state, and not everyone had the telephone, even in the towns. What struck grandma about the flu was that even ranchers who didn't seem to have had any contact with the folks who had been sick came down with the stuff. It was terrifically contagious. Some remote Alaskan villages were completely wiped out. And that's the problem, really. Flu is particularly good at adapting to its environment, leaping from people to pigs to birds and back and changing each time just enough to always be a moving target to our immune systems.

I know you said that you didn't see much point in vaccinating against something that endemic, but the thing is, *everything* we vaccinate against was endemic once. Scarlet fever, whooping cough, rubella -- all of them. And all of those diseases had death tolls, or caused long term damage in a percentage of cases. So it's the endemic stuff I want to be vaccinated against.

As for hiding in the house -- I think I'd do that if I weren't vaccinated, not the other way around. You pays your money and you takes your chances after all. But encephalitis lethargica (which is not the same as ordinary encephalitis) was a particularly strange pandemic, and we still don't know what caused it or what made it seem to go away.

Oh, gosh, I'm ranting again, aren't I? :D

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Yeah, but ranting is awesome. :-)

I suppose the difference I'm seeing between flu and these other endemic diseases we've wiped out is precisely it's ability to adapt and mutate. One day it's H5N1, the next it's H1N1. Pigs, chickens, humans, etc etc, exactly how you say about spreading like crazy (that's really interesting history about Montana btw. I always thought Spanish flu was spread across the world so bad because of WWI). So we're never going to wipe it out with a vaccination program (especially with the low efficacy vaccines of today, but at least there's hope for new ones!), much like we can't cure the common cold. Pesky viruses!

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Coming back up to this, my brother had a very mild case of chicken pox when he was a baby, but didn't keep the immunity from it (the rest of us were older and we did.) Then he had it again when he was 19 and it nearly killed him. Now he gets shingles. Same virus! Darn thing never really goes away.

The real problems that'v been coming up lately are whooping cough and diphtheria. Those are definitely killers, and its a shame that they're coming back.

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febobe.livejournal.com

Yes. And while some people consider CP a mild childhood disease, for those of us with compromised or otherwise impaired immunity, even if we've had CP, the virus can be lethal at worst, miserable at best, and not in an itchy way, in a severe pain way. I have known of other Hodgkin's survivors who actually DIED b/c they were exposed to the CP virus, even though they'd previously had CP.

The biggest mistake, I think, is that some people (not you, RSF, obviously) think that this decision only affects their own health. FAR from it. :(

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@febobe I am aware of how herd immunity works, having studied medical microbiology at University! I understand risk groups for whom chicken pox is not a mild disease. I understand that there are those are immunocompromised who cannot take the vaccine who are also at increased risk.

I was using chicken pox as an example of how the society you grow up in can effect your attitudes towards the severity of certain diseases. The OP was rabidsamfan venting her frustration at people giving excuses about not getting a vaccination. I wasn't intending to suggest that vaccination of chicken pox is wrong. I was trying to highlight how attitudes to vaccination, and indeed even advice given by government vary by culture. I am trying to suggest that there can be those who make a measured scientific decision not to vaccinate against flu (like myself) for reasons other than a fear of needles (I donate blood to medical science, seriously, that doesn't bother me!) or an idea that they don't get sick so they therefore can't be carrying the disease (I would suggest that the flu is spread in a very different way to typhoid though!).

Incidentally, there is no chicken pox vaccine option in my country, in case that wasn't obvious from my post.

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I heard just the other day that it is something like 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 people who can go on to develop shingles about childhood chicken pox infection. Considering pretty much everyone in the UK has had chicken pox as a child, those are some scary figures! I can only assume that most of those cases are mild, as I've heard shingles is one of the most painful things out there when you get it bad. As you say, virus literally never goes away, it lies dormant in the nervous system. Pretty nasty.

No vaccines give you life-long protection. The idea with vaccination programs is to wipe out the disease in young children as they can act as an incubator for all sorts of diseases. This helps protect the older population. I don't know specifics for chicken pox vaccine as we don't have it here, but for example the tetanus vaccine only gives you five years of protection. I suspect the reasoning behind not offering the vaccination here is the idea that acquired immunity from actually having the disease will trump the protection gained from vaccination. Although obviously, as your brother's case proves, that's not exactly foolproof.

Whooping cough is the one that's a big problem here in Cambridge. We still vaccinate against that one, but of course we have a lot of people coming in from all around the world to the University, and with such a diverse population it's likely that some bring it in. I've had my full round of pertussis vaccinations, but when I heard someone doing a funny cough the other day in the computer lab, I legged it! :-)

The other one on the rise is tuberculosis, but interestingly the government have withdrawn the BCG vaccination. On that point I can't agree with them. To withdraw something while the disease is actively on the rise seems crazy!

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only-po.livejournal.com

Last month my mom found out about the non-lifelong first hand -- she had a terrible cough, actually strained her ribs, and I thought she had a particularly bad case of bronchitis.

Nope. Whooping cough.

The dr said she had a "mild case" of it and the mildness was likely due to her vaccinations (albeit waning ones.) And if that was a "mild" case, I'd hate to see a regular one!

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Wow, hope she fully recovers! Good job she had had the vaccine though, right? I think regular whooping cough is like hospitalisation time. Certainly people have died of it here.

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Forbes has done a bunch of articles about vaccines lately. Here's the one on flu.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/01/11/the-flu-shots-not-a-great-vaccine-but-you-should-get-one-anyway/

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Well, that's certainly awesome news that AstraZeneca (they part fund my PhD, yay!) and Novatis have much more effective vaccines in development. I bet if something really effective came out the government would be more keen to roll the shot out to everyone.

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amedia.livejournal.com

Intruding with a quick footnote: I think we vaccinate against chicken pox in the U.S. because, if you haven't had chicken pox as a child, you're not likely to get shingles as an adult, which can be quite debilitating.

ETA: Whoops! Thought I had read the whole thread and missed the shingles reference. *foreheadsmack*

Edited Date: 2013-01-17 09:43 pm (UTC)

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shirebound

The last time I got the flu was the winter of 2000. I've had a flu shot every year since.

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gardnerhill.livejournal.com

Let's see, a quick jab in the arm that might be sore for 1 or 2 days (available FREE at a nearby government clinic or farmer's market) - or 2 solid weeks of being unable to leave my bed, coughing up nasty stuff and hoping to die? Decisions, decisions....

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piplover.livejournal.com

The three years I was in the Army and forced to get the flu shot I became very ill each time. The almost 8 years I've been out, I've had the flu once, and that was the pig flu. I got that because the person sitting in the cubicle next to me, who had received the shot, by the way, was hacking and coughing and spreading and not washing his hands. And because I have asthma it went right to my lungs. But that was the only year I've had it, and I would rather suffer the flu than the reaction to the flu shot.

Also, all the years I didn't have the flu shot? I worked in retail, and had to deal with people hacking and coughing and handing me their grubby money.

For most people, the flu shot is a good idea. But for others, like me, it really is either just as bad or worse than the flu itself.

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Yup, if you have a history of a bad reaction to the vaccine, then it's a legitimate reason not to take the shot.

I had to take a lot of shots when I was in the Air National Guard, and I've been eternally grateful to the nurse who told me to take a couple of aspirin before the injections. Never had a bad reaction to one since, regardless of how much they'd made me ache before that. (Don't you just love sergeants who want you to lift boxes with a sore arm?)

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