A GRACIOUS PLENTY: WTF??????

Take it easy, people. It's What The FLU?????!!!!!

How often does this happen? In your personally and socially responsible way, you get your flu shot every year. And way too soon afterward, you fall victim to.....the flu! It's just WRONG! A little WWW snooping revealed what's really going on.

The flu that has you cozyed up to the commode, dealing with a faucet going at either end or maybe both, fever and headache, ignoring your usually meticulous personal hygiene and sleeping lots is popularly known as the stomach flu. It's more properly called Gastroenteritis. According to WebMD, it's an inflammation of the intestinal tract caused by various viruses and involves the well-known symptoms mentioned above. It's spread mainly through respiratory secretions, and loves to run through groups of people in close contact. It's uncomfortable while it lasts, but has a high recovery rate.

The flu for which you get immunized is Influenza. It's caused by a couple of different viruses, and lands in the respiratory system. It's a more severe illness, and can lead to complications such as pneumonia and death. It also loves to run through groups of people in close contact. Historically, Influenza has been epidemic and pandemic. Though 100 years might seem like a long time ago, the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1917-1919 wiped out ONE THIRD of the WORLD population. 50 million people died; 675,000 of those in the United States. That's the approximate size of present-day El Paso or Detroit. Yowza!

Source: Kenton County (KY) public library

A lot of knowledge and experience has been gained since then. (The world population has also more than rebounded, breeders that we humans are.) The World Health Organization gathers information from 114 participating countries to monitor and investigate influenza patterns world-wide. This constant information gathering is how they arrive at the best-guess components of each year's influenza vaccination. It's still risky, though. Last year's vaccination was a miss, and was partly responsible for an estimated record 80,000 people dying of influenza in the United States. That's the approximate size of Bloomington, IN or Troy, MI.

There's a vaccination concept called herd immunity. According to Google's dictionary, herd immunity is "the resistance to the spread of a contagious disease within a population that results if a sufficiently high proportion of individuals are immune to the disease, especially through vaccination". Though health officials recommend everyone over the age of 6 months be vaccinated for influenza, current vaccination rates are 50%. For herd immunity to take effect, 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated. (Source: www.cnbc.com.) The concept holds that not only do you decrease your own risk for getting influenza and/or lessening its effects, your not getting influenza exponentially reduces the number of cases of influenza you could cause if you got influenza yourself. That's the herd part.

Source: www.immunology.org

You've probably heard the old saw about how similar babies and older folks are. My current experience with that has to do with vaccinations. As a child I was fully vaccinated; within my memory are the polio vaccinations given on sugar cubes and the smallpox vaccination - the one that left a scar. At about age 55 I decided I was close enough to the old-age high risk group for influenza and started getting that vaccination each year. I got the old version of the Shingles vaccination a few years ago, and recently got the two-dose new and improved version. Add to that the first of the two-dose Pneumonia vaccination this past Wednesday.