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icarusAnd this would be why I don't get a flu shot:
Resistance to flu drug widespread in US: study
Viruses are highly adaptive. We've overused antibiotics. Many antibiotics are now ineffective. Now three flu drugs are ineffective: rimantadine and amantadine and Tamiflu. It's obvious to me that we've overused flu vaccines. Those should be for small children, the sick, and the elderly. Not pushed by companies that don't want to pay for sick days.
In other news: looking at a mountain of work for school.
Starting. That's the hard part. Starting.
ETA: Folks keep thinking that I'm mixing up vaccines with the drugs used to treat influenza. No. I'm not.
Doctors will still say get the flu vaccine, the same way they used to prescribe antibiotics like candy.
I was leery back in the 80s when everyone was prescribed an antibiotic for everything.
I evaded the antibiotics then. I'm not a bit surprised to find they were overused to the point of uselessness. People argued with me then, too.
Now I'm not buying it on the flu vaccines.
This is just one person's anecdotal observation, but I've noticed the flu season has been getting worse and worse. That spike began in the mid-to-late 90s when flu vaccines started being used to inoculate everyone who'd take it, and not just the vulnerable. (Actually, the spike started when flu vaccine makers began marketing to businesses that they'd have less loss of productivity if they got their employees to take it.)
Mark my words. In three to five years we'll start seeing studies that show an increase in the severity and number of flu viruses. In ten, we'll see a link between overuse of flu vaccines and the sheer variety and severity of flus.
Flu vaccines just aren't the same as your typical mumps, rubella, etc. vaccine. Viruses mutate. That constant mutation is why the flu vaccine has to be different each year, and why it only includes an immunization for the top seven or eight viruses the CDC guesses will be the "bad ones" for the season.
Resistance to flu drug widespread in US: study
Viruses are highly adaptive. We've overused antibiotics. Many antibiotics are now ineffective. Now three flu drugs are ineffective: rimantadine and amantadine and Tamiflu. It's obvious to me that we've overused flu vaccines. Those should be for small children, the sick, and the elderly. Not pushed by companies that don't want to pay for sick days.
In other news: looking at a mountain of work for school.
Starting. That's the hard part. Starting.
ETA: Folks keep thinking that I'm mixing up vaccines with the drugs used to treat influenza. No. I'm not.
Doctors will still say get the flu vaccine, the same way they used to prescribe antibiotics like candy.
I was leery back in the 80s when everyone was prescribed an antibiotic for everything.
I evaded the antibiotics then. I'm not a bit surprised to find they were overused to the point of uselessness. People argued with me then, too.
Now I'm not buying it on the flu vaccines.
This is just one person's anecdotal observation, but I've noticed the flu season has been getting worse and worse. That spike began in the mid-to-late 90s when flu vaccines started being used to inoculate everyone who'd take it, and not just the vulnerable. (Actually, the spike started when flu vaccine makers began marketing to businesses that they'd have less loss of productivity if they got their employees to take it.)
Mark my words. In three to five years we'll start seeing studies that show an increase in the severity and number of flu viruses. In ten, we'll see a link between overuse of flu vaccines and the sheer variety and severity of flus.
Flu vaccines just aren't the same as your typical mumps, rubella, etc. vaccine. Viruses mutate. That constant mutation is why the flu vaccine has to be different each year, and why it only includes an immunization for the top seven or eight viruses the CDC guesses will be the "bad ones" for the season.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-03 12:26 am (UTC)It does make sense for your employer to push the flu shot, as it does confer limited short term immunity. And short-term productivity is what employers have to care about. Doctors here tell you to get a vaccination if you are old, have asthma or are immunocompromised. They keep telling me to have a vaccination and I shrug and say I'd rather be alive when I'm 90 than not spend a couple of weeks in bed now. And she makes a face at me and tells me she'll see me in hospital the next time I get pneumonia. (For me respiratory infection=secondary infection=pneumonia, eventually. Buckets of fun.)
This stuff makes me so angry. It took 40 years for the medical profession to stop pushing antibiotics as a cure-all, with the result that a friend of mine has horrendous scars on her breasts from MRSA. I guess the government subsidy for CSR (Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, the only place that produces flu vaccine in Australia) means that most organisations toe the party line with flu vaccines.
You want to vaccinate for polio? I will hold down people who think that it doesn't apply to them.
If it's a pandemic and a lethal strain and the hospitals are overloaded and we're running out of anti-virals, yes, vaccinate. But not before then.
*coughs and steps off soapbox* Sorry, I got rant all over your journal.