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Highly mutable surface proteins are the key to influenza's evolutionary success. So after the virus incubates in you and mutates through millions of generations; the virus you give to me because you sneezed without covering will not be the same as the one the vaccine was developed against months ago. Sure you could argue that the mutations are of the point variety and do not cause amino acids changes, but with such a high mutation frequency structural changes in the surface proteins are likely. I think if you get vaccinated, you won't get H1N1 but you may get H1xN1y, a related bug that your immune system will have to recognize and fight on its own.
Just my $0.02 but I thought someone would discuss the actual biology of orthomyxoviridae.
As a Reg. Nurse I feel obligated to protect my patients. As a mother and grandmother, I simply want to protect my family. True, it is not as well researched as we'd like, but I still believe the benefits will outweigh the risk. Just heard of another child dying in our city....we need to get this and do anything to protect children and their young parents.
Natural immunity vs. induced immunity: My T cells and B cells don't know the difference between an antigen that has come in from a needle or from my neighbor who sneezed on me. Your immune system doesn't care which vector the virus invades from and will respond regardless. In fact your immune system will respond the same to both vectors of infection.
It always puzzles me when I hear people say that they would rather get sick with a virus than to be immunized because they think it is better to let your body do it naturally. I find there to be no value in exposing yourself to a harmful situation on purpose when you could be vaccinated instead saving yourself from the risk of serious disease or death. Every time you get sick you run the risk of serious disease or death. It is NEVER good to let yourself become infected by a pathogenic virus if there is an alternative. It is also important to point out that you may not gain immunity from a so called "natural" infection. Your immune system may not have mounted a strong enough response to the infection and as a result there isn't strong enough memory to protect against future infection. This is one of the best reasons to vaccinate over allowing a so called "natural" infection to take place; you can control the dose of the vaccine to make sure that all of the population gets a dose that will cause a protective immune response.
The ancients had no choice but to allow themselves to fight these viruses off "naturally" and they died from lots of these diseases in spite of that fact. "Natural" immunity didn't help against Polio or Small pox. Without the vaccine people would still be dying of both diseases. In fact some people still are dying because they don't have access to the vaccine and their "natural" immunity can cut it.
With that being said, I work for a company that makes the H1N1 and other vaccines, and have the inside scoop on the processes and chemicals used to make vaccines. Knowing what I know about risks vs. benefits and vaccines vs. diseases, I make sure that my wife, our two toddlers, and I get every vaccine available and on the CDC recommended schedule.
The amount of misinformation and outright lies propagated by the anti-vaccine crowd is just staggering. Their hatred of vaccines is an unfortunate ideology, and they don't care about who they hurt. I find myself doing a fair bit of explaining to friends and family about not only the H1N1 but vaccines in general. "I read on this website..." is a common argument. I also do some "front-line" work of trying to correct the wackos on the web.
Fortunately, H1N1 has so far been a mild flu, so the anti-vaccine crowd can be dead wrong with little consequence in this regard.
One website I recommend is called sciencebasedmedicine.org. I send the link of this blog entry ( http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1229 ) to any friends or family that want to learn what exactly this "flu bug" is.
Excellent blog and podcast Dr. Racaniello, keep up the good work!
As an aside, comments from people like you, the Reveres, and Orac are really valuable, at least to me. I am a scientist in a completely different field (cryptography), and can't independently evaluate the risks and rewards of a given vaccine. Official recommendations can be (and often are) as much products of politics as science. I especially worry about that with something like swine flu, which has gotten so much media attention, and so probably a lot of attention from the Pointy Haired Bosses/political appointees at the top of various agencies. And most media coverage of scientific issues is worse than useless. Reading comments from you guys is really helpful.
I think it's foolish to ignore the demonstrated and proven scientific objective history of botched vaccines; from the swine flu vaccine fiasco under President Ford to the proven WHO lies about polio vaccines that killed people. Those horrific tales are peer-reviewed. Why ignore them completely. They should be factored into any rational decision.
I study decisions for a living. I have a rude, robust and nasty immune system. I'm not sickly nor obese, nor frankly impotent like so many Americans; I'm in fabulous health, my blood pressure is 105/70, remarkable for someone 50 years old in the US. My resting pulse is 60 times per minute and I don't eat trashy and sugary food, so I can afford to wait a little longer to be certain that this is not another botched job from underfunded public health entities. My glycosylated hemoglobin count, an outstanding heuristic for gauging overall health, is in the 95th percentile.
Besides, I know that it's often the SECONDARY infections such as pneumonia that do the actual killing in these epidemics and I do have a pneumonia vaccine.
This H1N1 just isn't going to kill me. So I'm going to track the infection locally here as well as I can before getting vaccinated.
And I got a small stash of Tamiflu prescribed for me by a rational doctor several months ago that I have on hand in case the foregoing analysis is flawed.
I don't fucking trust the government or pharmaceutical corporations.
Oh, and I don't like injecting mercury into my bloodstream. That's just a horrible idea.
The fact that Thiomersal is not straight mercury has been address but consider this...
I would not inject pure chlorine into my blood but I eat table salt all the time NaCl which is half chlorine. I also wouldn't drink bleach, OCl, which has chlorine in it... This is how things are in chemistry. Things behave differently as an element versus as a compound. An example of a use of mercury in the body is with dentistry. They have and still use mercury in the silver fillings. These are called amalgams and are mixtures of sliver/gold and mercury. You may have a few in your mouth. These usually last 15+ years and would theoretically expose you to more mercury than Thiomersal would and Thiomersal won't hang around in the body.
YOU DUMB PIECE OF CRAPPY SHIT.
Even if it did, I would still try to get the vaccine under the supervision of an allergist. Unfortunately our health department in AZ will not be giving our allergists office any of the vaccine. (which I think is crazy considering all of the asthma patients allergic to egg who should get the vaccine under the supervision fo an allergist.
I am an asthmatic and have alpha one antitrypsin deficiency as well as my daughter (age 11). Until we can get the vaccine we have been employing social distancing to prevent getting sick. My daughter is doing her school work from home. The regular flu makes us very very sick. She got her seasonal shot last year and still was very sick with the flu in March and needed to go to the ER for breathing treatments.
We are not taking our chances with this flu. No way.
What aggravates me to no end is how cavalier everyone is and how nuts they are about the vaccine. There is a Dr. Mercola telling people that it is linked with a Nerve Disease (GBS) I constantly have to correct people on Facebook about the vaccine. There are a lot of quacks out there using scare tactics. What annoys me is that people are taking their advice at face value and not even researching the facts.
Incidentally-does anyone know if there are any sulfides/sulfites present in the vaccine? because it has egg (which naturally has sulfites/or sulfides) I was not sure how much egg there was in the vaccine and if there were sulfites, how much there were.
Can't seem to find this info anywhere.
So like most of the posts here, I too, am willing to have the nano chip tracking device installed with the vaccine that allows Dick Cheney to control my thoughts.
We get the seasonal vaccine annually.
Also I know enough history to understand that the experts of the day know less then they think they do about the long term effects of certain substances/treatments. There are many things in the past that were thought to be "perfectly safe" that only years later the full long term effects became clear.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support the scientific method. It's just the risk/reward calculation for this one doesn't play out for this one.
Anytime you inject a foreign substance into your body there is risk. Heck even if the science behind the vaccine is rock-solid.... there is no assurance that QA at the manufacturer might not screw up with the batch you are being given....or that it might have been tampered with... or that you could even get an infection at the injection site (not from the vaccine).
Bottom line is that H1N1 does not seem that serious a risk to people in relatively good health (which describes myself and my family). Thus the vaccine doesn't strike me as truely neccesary.
If that situation were different....and we were at higher risk.....or the disease was alot nastier then it sounds that equation might be different.
I highly suspect we won't catch it....and if we do. I don't anticipate it doing any more damage to us then a bad case of the regular flu.
And yeah...I remember '76 too.
In Ontario, our seasonal flu shot clinics will be held later, and we'll all get jabbed again then too.
As I am vaccinating healthcare staff, I spend most of my time teaching, educating staff about the vaccines. Now, you would think that healthcare staff would do the research-- very easy these days with internet available-- they don't. So, if I am having a hard time with healthcare staff, I can not imagine what's going on in the general public. Often, I have to correct misinformation from primary care physicians. Just today, I had a medical staff person who would not take the H1N1 FluMist, because his doctor told him, he should not have it, because his wife is pregnant....
As our injectable vaccine supply is very limited and we require staff who can take the FluMist to take it, I could not give him the injectable vaccine. He walked out.
Also today, I spent 15 minutes convincing a cardiologist to take the FluMist. In that time I could have vaccinated 10 other people.....
Ignorance is still killing more people than science....
Is one dose enough? I read that they need two.
So this is why I am nervous...
Mabye check out how many people die from seasonal influenza each year..... appx 35,000 a year in the US.
So, I took a shot that was innefective, and now they tell me I need to take a shot that may be innefctive and has NOT been tested?
Damned if I do and Damned if I dont.
Read about it before you act!!!!
http://vaers.hhs.gov/index
none in that time period vaccination would be a good idea.
Also, if H1N1 is such a serious threat and almost no one is getting the vaccine... why is it there have been only [roughly] 6, 700 related deaths worldwide due to H1N1 infection as opposed to 250, 000 to 500, 000 annual deaths due to seasonal flu infection.
ALSO lets not forget that those who are at the most severe risk - the elderly and pregnant women, the latter of which I probably wouldn't even recommend getting vaccinated due to the more prominent threat the content of the vaccine itself poses to the developing child due to the 100% guarantee the child will come into contact with the contents, where H1N1 is not guaranteed to come into contact with the mother or her baby.
All of us fall into the priority group, and my husband and myself meet multiple priority group requirements (direct contact with high-risk groups and a history of moderate to severe asthma).
None of us experienced any side effects beyond the usual post-IM injection pain (modified by giving each patient appropriate doses of ibuprofen one hour before the injection and then q6h x2 days after the injection).
I had (and continue to have) no qualms regarding the thimerosal preservative or the "untested" nature of the vaccine (a popular reason given by otherwise intelligent and well-educated parents and staff in my sons' elementary school, when I proposed holding an H1N1 vaccine clinic).
It worries me terribly that, at least in my middle-to-upper class neighbourhood, very few priority patients are making any effort to find H1N1 vaccination clinics and some of the parents of paediatric priority patients are actively declining both the seasonal vaccine and the H1N1 vaccine. Some parents have commented that since other children are vaccinated, their child is protected de facto; despite my best efforts, these parents do not seem able or willing to understand the concept of herd health.
I believe, unfortunately, that it will take the hospitalisation or death of an otherwise healthy child (e.g., one with no underlying health problems diagnosed pre- or post-mortem) before these recalcitrant parents will vaccinate their children, and even then, I am not sure that denial (this couldn't happen to me, that parent must have done something wrong) will not still keep these parents beholden to the various myths floating around regarding the seasonal and H1N1 vaccines as well as other vaccines.
Just as a side note, I have heard anecdotal reports of the H1N1 injectable vaccine being more painful than usual. I did not pre- or post-medicate my own self with ibuprofen for either vaccine and if anything, the H1N1 was less painful than the seasonal vaccine. Please note that this is my subjective experience and I do not know what gauge needle was used for the seasonal vaccine; for the H1N1 vaccine was administered via a 25 x 1 1/4" bevelled needle.
Would you vaccinate your 8 year old (healthy) child if they were going to get the Canadian vaccine-Arenpanrix??
Thanks
Another confused parent.
available here in the US. What is your concern about that vaccine?
Thanks
A mom
to minimize them but present my explanation of what is known. AS03,
made by GSK, contains squalene, DL-alpha-tocopherol (a vitamin E
derivative) and tween 80. A very similar adjuvant made by Novartis is
MF59, which contains squalene, tween 80, and the surfactant sorbitan
trioleate. While AS03 has not been extensively tested, MF59 has been
used in influenza vaccines in Europe for many years without serious
consequences. There are over 30 peer-reviewed publications describing
the use of MF59 in vaccines. This may mitigate everyone's concerns
about squalene. Would it be useful to write a post summarizing our
experience with both adjuvants?
We are to wait and see.
There was noticeable pain at the injection site, but so far that was the only discomfort.
How long would it usually take to gather the information on whether the immune response to protect from H1N1 virus is effective with just a half dose in younger children??
There seems to be differing opinions ( of course!) between the national and provincial health officials if a half dose will give the needed protection.
A mom
protective. At worst it will lead to infection but milder disease.
My husband was able to get the vaccine a few days ago. He went with 2 other work mates and by the next day all of them felt as if they had "the flu"....no fever but all the other classic symptoms.
Are symptoms from the vaccine any indication about a persons immune response?
Is there any medical evidence to back up suggestions that people that feel like they have "the flu" after a vaccination are better protected against-in this case- H1N1 virus?
I am more inclined to think it was perhaps the batch of vaccine as they were all vaccinated at the same time or some other effect.
A mom
not; it's not required. I try to post information here that can help
everyone make decisions, based on the idea that by understanding the
underlying science you can make a better choice. We do try to learn
from past vaccine mistakes, but errors will always happen. My advice
is always to balance the risk of influenza with the risk of side
effects. The inactivated influenza vaccine has been produced for a
very long time and it has an excellent safety record. On the other
hand, half a million people die each year of flu and more might die
this year.
There is no scientific evidence that homeopathy works as anything but a placebo. There is no harm in trying it for minor ailments if one is so inclined but it would be extremely unwise to rely on it to protect you from a potentially life-threatening illness.
15 year old daughter got it last week
Well, finally, after two weeks, my 23-yr old daughter, who received the swine-origin H1N1 nasal spray vaccine and consequently had a bit of a headache and tonsillitis, is perfectly well again.
Perhaps the vaccine had something to do with her tonsillitis, but more likely I suppose, she coincidently had another virus lurking around which decided to confuse us by striking at that time!
I have not read of any similar reactions, so I'll have to put it down to coincidence.
Still think we'll choose the injection next time if available.