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Did You Get A Flu Shot?
So, I was talking to a mom friend of mine who was coming down with a cold. I asked her if she had her flu shot this season. She said, “No. I don’t get flu shots. I’m a little skeptical of them.” Skeptical? She explained that she never got them as a child and thought that they really weren’t that effective. After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I asked her if her kids get them. Nope.
Are there a lot of flue shot skeptics out there that I haven’t met yet? Having been raised by a mother who was a nurse, yearly flu shots were mandatory. My family got their flu shots this season. My sons’ school even offered free vaccines. Now, I know that there has been some controversy regarding this year’s flu shot strain.Even if this year’s shot is less effective than in years past, is it wise to skip it? Are there justifiable and informed reasons to not get the flu shot every year?
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I wonder if it was ‘flu’ at any point, as both ends are truncated. :)
I don’t do ’phone, but I have been known to use ’flu in my writing. I cop to the charge of being utterly charming. ; )
The flu shot IS a crap shoot. There are different strains of the flu… some of them wildly so… and it’s pure guesswork on the part of the CDC when deciding which strains to predict will hit when preparing a vaccine for the coming flu season. This year, they guessed badly, and I’ve seen figures of around 40% effectiveness this year in regards to vaccinated people that get the flu.
I normally get one every year, but I missed it this year. I do believe they help out, though perhaps not as much as the hype. I have not gotten the flu so far.
I have a stone that repels tigers that I’d like to sell you…
Google Scholar: Fever during pregnancy.
“Does lowering a fever >101°F in children improve clinical outcomes?”
These were all extremely easy to find. I’m sure there is much more if you aren’t satisfied. But I’m sure if we were simply all Paleo we would practically never get sick…
Yes.
Are you aware that it supports my point, and not yours?
“But I’m sure if we were simply all Paleo we would practically never get sick…”
Sadly, viruses and bacteria are eminently paleo. But malnutrition does raise the likelihood of all diseases, and makes their course worse.
“A malnourished person finds that their body has difficulty doing normal things such as growing and resisting disease.”
Pray tell. Back up your own assertions.
And in point of fact, it appears that it does change the course: it makes it worse:
“…There were seven deaths in the aggressive group and only one death in the permissive group (p = 0.06, Fisher Exact Test). The study was stopped after the first interim analysis due to the mortality difference…
“CONCLUSIONS: Aggressively treating fever in critically ill patients may lead to a higher mortality rate.”
I don’t recall ever getting a flu shot before just a few years ago. Now I get one every year. It seems like more workplaces are runnign free flu shot clinics, don’t recall seeing those in the past.
My 87-year-old mother (retired RN) got it this year – both the shot and the flu.
I had the flu once, many years ago. Really, really unpleasant. Couldn’t make it from the bathroom to the bedroom with out stopping to lie on the floor for 5 minutes to rest halfway there. Ended up in the ER for IV’s after getting dehydrated.
People have asked me the difference between a cold and the flu. I tell them it’s the difference between getting hit in the head with a ruler and getting hit in the head with a baseball bat.
Of course. The study in the comment above is from this post—you’ll appreciate the title:
Are Fevers Paleo?
Antipyretic therapy in febrile critically ill adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. (2013 compared to your 2005, and a review which included your specific study.)
At best ambiguous and restricted to the extremely ill. Hardly:
That’s a key point. These fellows created a study to address those failings.
While that study had a serious problem:
“Information for NSAIDs and acetaminophen was recorded only when these were administered for fever management, not for pain control.”
(That’s a confounder that you could drive a truck through. They have no idea how many of the “control” patients were actually controlled. There are a few other confounders.)
Nevertheless:
“Although we reported associations and cannot assume causality, our finding was consistent with previous studies [26,27], suggesting that fever could be a host response that protects against infectious diseases [11–13] and use of antipyretic treatments to suppress the febrile response to infection might worsen outcomes [14,15].”
Yes, I understand there might be something to fever being good in some cases. I never suggested otherwise, but your statement lacked any “mights” or “critically ills.” I said specifically that the data currently point to a mother’s fever being an undue risk to the child. Your response was a study that shows in specifically dire cases to elderly patients there might be worse outcomes with antipyretics and generalized this to fighting fever leading to worse outcomes in all cases.
I’m not a vaccine skeptic but I’ve never gotten the flu shot as an adult and I’m pretty sure I never did as a child. I’ve had the flu maybe once in my life? Not that it means I’ll never get it but it’s not been something I’ve worried with.
My husband (a biologist) and I (a nurse) get our flu shots every year, as well as one for our daughter. As my husband says, “there is very little downside to getting a flu shot.”
Even if it’s not great, I’ll take that little bit of extra protection from feeling miserable for a few days. Even if it’s just 23%, as this year’s lousy shot apparently is.
No flu vaccine for me unless I was immune compromised or elderly. And I plan to die young so I don’t think there will be a need.
The problem is that you can’t easily differentiate between fever and infection. There’s little evidence to suggest that moderate, non-infectious increases in core body temp are harmful, which suggests it’s the infection. (One doc found his core body temp could get near 107F, with no signs of impairment—he was running a marathon.)
There’s lots of evidence that infection is harmful—no surprise.
Yes, because that’s the evidence that exists regarding fever and infection and poor outcomes.
Turning around and saying fever is an undue risk is a failure of logic. Infection is an undue risk: fever is a symptom, and all the evidence suggests it’s protective.
I’m libertarian when it comes to vaccines. My kids did not react well to the MMR given in infancy. I noticed that the veterinarians don’t give shots to nursing pups because they get immunity from the mother’s milk and the shot does them no good until they are weaned (Or so I’m told). Yet it seems the medical establishment wants to push multiple vaccines on newborn humans.
Do we trust our government and our government schools to mandate putting a substance into our bodies that could react badly based on personal or family history? Don’t tell me about statistics when my kid is the one with the arm swollen like a sausage and crying like a tortured cat.
On the other hand I have had the full-blown flu a couple of times – once followed by pneumonia, which really had me on the ropes. I did not at that point in my life take flu shots. I take the flu shots now. I don’t seem to react badly to them and if they help me avoid something that bad, I am for them.
I got the Vaccine once, but few % probability reduction in getting the flu is not worth the $30 or $40 dollars it cost along with the time and hassle to go do it.
However, I am a huge skeptic of the Chicken Pox vaccine especially the mandatory requirement by most school systems. It would be one thing if it were permanent vaccine. However, vaccine that needs to be done every ten years, against an annoying one time sickness that has almost no chance of being serious for kids, forget it. Especially when you consider the serious of the disease grows expectational the older you are if you get it as an adult. To me there is nothing scientific logical about even needing this vaccine unless you are an older adult who never had it, so it ends up smelling like crony capitalism to me.
To me (even though I am against the mandatory requirement) mandatory HPV vaccines make way more logically sense than Mandatory Chicken Pox Vaccines.
Would considering cases of heat stroke help?
Not that the effects of heat stroke are necessarily easy to separate from concurrent dehydration or hyponatremia, and the temperature elevations in heat stroke are rather extreme. But at least infection is usually not an issue.
I have no doubt my body “thinks” it’s being helpful when it’s giving me a fever, and I trust that fever is in general an adaptive mechanism. Yet I’m me, not a general case, and my body also “thinks” it’s being helpful when it reacts to certain allergens as if they were poison gas and tries to suffocate me. (Ancestral eating seems to decrease the problem, but not enough to forgo powerful medications.)
The advice I’ve heard is, “Treat a fever if you feel like it’s impairing your function when you need to function; otherwise don’t worry about it unless the fever is very high.” Very wishy-washy, and maybe not applicable to pregnancy. But shrug, it seems like there are worse ways of handling our sometimes-wayward bodies.
I got one when my company gave them on site. I have gotten only one since the company was sold and moved six years ago. I’ve had the flu one time. I do not plan on the getting another unless mandated by the company I work for (then I will look for a new company.)
The chickenpox vaccine is indeed a much more difficult case to make than our traditional childhood vaccines. The rationale for the vaccine, aside from preventing the small number of cases which progress to true suffering and/or death, is primarily economical: according to (ahem) statistical modeling, the non-medical costs associated with kids getting chickenpox are greater than the cost of vaccination itself.
This is obviously a much weaker argument than those in favor of vaccines against measles, whooping cough, etc.
Also, while it does appear that protection conferred by the chickenpox vaccine does not last very long in some individuals, I don’t think it’s accurate to state that “the vaccine needs to be done every ten years” – certainly this is not part of any official recommendation I am aware of.
LOL, no. :)
I put the phrase “moderate, non-infectious increases in core body temp” specifically to avoid getting into the topic of heat stroke.
Jumping into boiling oil is also to be avoided, pregnant or not!
I thought the CP vaccine had more to do with the prevent of shingles later on in life?
Serious question to everyone out there who says they don’t get the flu shot: Why the heck not? Even if it only affords you a tiny scrap of protection why not get it? Most of us can get it for free or for a nominal price so why not?
Yes, you appear to be correct: “CDC recommends two doses of chickenpox vaccine for children, adolescents, and adults.”
The big hassle with chicken pox isn’t even chicken pox, it’s shingles, which can be a very unpleasant experience. My wife just got a case and was in a great deal of pain.
I’m sure that she would have gone back in time and given herself a vaccine against chicken pox to avoid shingles if she could have!
When I was a kid they’d have chicken pox parties: expose kids to it to get them over it.
You also mentioned a guy whose marathon temperature is 107 degrees (above “heat stroke” range) with apparently no ill-effects, making it somewhat less clear whether “moderate” and “heat stroke” could overlap.
Also here is a study from WHO saying 90% vaccinated as children still have immunities as adults.
I concede that you are 100% right. I don’t know why not.