Posted on 12/19/2017 7:38:13 PM PST by MtnClimber
One Sunday in November 20-year-old Alani Murrieta of Phoenix began to feel sick and left work early. She had no preexisting medical conditions but her health declined at a frighteningly rapid pace, as detailed by her family and friends in local media and on BuzzFeed News. The next day she went to an urgent care clinic, where she was diagnosed with the flu and prescribed the antiviral medication Tamiflu. But by Tuesday morning she was having trouble breathing and was spitting up blood. Her family took her to the hospital, where x-rays revealed pneumonia: inflammation in the lungs that can be caused by a viral or bacterial infection, or both. Doctors gave Murrieta intravenous antibiotics and were transferring her to the intensive care unit when her heart stopped; they resuscitated her but her heart stopped again. At 3:25 P.M. on Tuesday, November 28one day after being diagnosed with the fluMurrieta was declared dead.
Worldwide, the flu results in three million to five million cases of severe illness and 291,000 to 646,000 deaths annually, according to the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the totals vary greatly from one year to the next. .........
How does the flu kill? The short and morbid answer is that in most cases the body kills itself by trying to heal itself. Dying from the flu is not like dying from a bullet or a black widow spider bite, says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. The presence of the virus itself isn't going to be what kills you. An infectious disease always has a complex interaction with its host.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
It's true. Your dog can still get rabies after years of vaccines too. No vaccine is perfect. They don't really know all the "whyfors" of those things yet.
Medicine is an art, not a science. Sometimes sh*t just happens. And don't worry too much because the handle on the grocery cart is probably the best vaccine of your life for the common bad guys.
I’m having a hurry up and wait day. Flu threads always interest me. The only time I’ve been hospitalized with an illness was with complications from the flu. Had my shot that year, but got one of the strains they didn’t vaccinated for. That was the sickest I’ve ever been in my life. I get my flu vaxx annually, but I’m hoping that having had it may provide some additional, longer lasting immunity.
Good to know and thanks from Michigan. They said it would be horrific this year, but you know.... It's like the snow predictions, right? Sometimes they hit it and others they don't.
Take care, had those hands myself on many occasions. Am using Aric's GoferGreese this year with much success. It's olive oil and beeswax. Awesome. Esp here in northern Michigan where it is already dry, dry, dry.
I believe you are correct. Ive had many people say to me, oh, Ive got the flu, have a really sore throat and runny nose, but I went to work when in fact what they probably had is a head cold. Not to say that bad head cold wont make you feel pretty miserable or even compel you to stay home from work for a day, but the difference is that a flu often comes on very suddenly as opposed to a common cold, and with the flu, you tend to run a fever, sometimes high and have extreme body aches and fatigue, and by fatigue, I mean, cant hardly get out of bed or lift your head off the pillow sort of fatigue.
I get wintertime allergies. When it comes on it comes on fast and feels a lot like the flu, I start out sneezing like crazy, eyes water, nose runs and I even get body aches and sometimes feel hot and flushed but typically do not run a fever. The way I know it was an allergy attack is that it goes away completely in about 24-hours. The last time I had the flu, I was in bed for 5 days, missed 4 days of work and it took another 5 days or so before I felt well again.
I have given that much thought - about crossover and past vaccine immunity hanging around with the T and B cells - in my case from the last many years of flu vaccine.
I had salmonella twice in college (from stupidity), cultured and proven. Later I worked in a lab that took my blood and tried to titer out my antibody to it, but stopped at something like 1:10 million and gave up. My serum was still responding at that enormously high dilution. Anyway, gives credence to the idea that titers can hang out for years - and so, perhaps your bout with flu will keep you from ever having that strain and cousins again.
I never mind getting the vaccines. Someone in Vermont commented above about it being a bad year. Wonder if it is working eastward?
It could, depending on the strain. I got the Russian flu when I was in HS back in 1978 which was an H1N1 strain so I hope that has given me at least partial immunity. Well over half of my school came down with it over a two-week period. There were so many absences that the school postponed our midterm exams. The big thing I remember about it was not just the fatigue and chest congestion, but the splitting headache, like someone had split my head open with an axe, that lasted about 2 days. I remember my mother putting a heavy blanket over my bedroom window to keep the light out and putting cold washcloths on my head.
1977 Russian flu (H1N1)
The outbreak of Russian flu first appeared in northen China in May 1977 and spread throughout Russia by December, and the rest of the world in 1978. As mentioned above, the virus was subsequently found to be virtually identical to one that had caused a human epidemic in 1950. Consequently, most people over 23 years old possessed antibody to it. Thus, the pandemic was confined almost entirely to children and teenagers. Thankfully, the illness was quite mild and weekly attack rates at peak were about 13% in children 714 years old. Unlike the previous two pandemic viruses, this virus failed to replace the previously circulating influenza A virus, such that currently both H1N1 and H3N2 viruses circulate in humans.
https://www.rapidreferenceinfluenza.com/chapter/B978-0-7234-3433-7.50010-4/aim/influenza-pandemics-of-the-past
Good luck.
In my grandfather’s generation, three of seven children died during childhood. Two in one week, from diphtheria.
Dakota Territory, 1880s-1890s. The treatment for diphtheria then, was gargling with kerosene.
When we were doing a lot of research for related threads back in 2002 when I think this was a hot topic, we were digging medical journals and the like. The CDC and immunologists in general know the unbelievable impact this would have on a modern healthy population. Most people entirely misunderstand the risk evaluation. The think of antibiotics and modern medicine in general being so advanced compared to 1918 that they simply discount the risk.
At that time was the first reference to the cytokine blast effect and posters thought we were making it up because no one had ever heard the term.
Six feet is the safe distance for droplet precautions.
Horizontal distance or vertical distance?
I have always been taught that in hospital training but I believe the meaning is that a sneeze or cough can send droplets six feet in your direction. So horizontal.
Terrible article. To realize how flus affect us, the phrase the immune system needs to be replaced. A network of organs, they define it once. They might as well use the watchamacallit.
There is no round pink pulsating organ called The Immune System, located under the pancreas and next to the carburetor. It is a system and it is our biome of bacteria which influences the reaction to invading harmful creatures. One can have a huge effect upon this complex system using only diet and lifestyle.
For instance, Id guess that poor 20 year old girl who died in AZ last month was undernourished. Her vitamin D levels were low. Her bacterial biome was suboptimal. Key minerals (missing from our American diet, poor soil) were not at therapeutic levels.
There is a reason she died when the person she caught the flu from didnt. I dont know what that is, but nutrition and lifestyle is the best way to beat the flu. Keep your nutritional intake strong and nourishing for you and your helpful bacteria. Keep your helpful bacteria population high and your harmful population low enough. Get sleep and mental rest.
There was another name for it - cytokine something...
Yep. And to add to your post, work at a job you love. Have a puppy dog or two. Walk. Sleep. Eat some oranges. Learn to cook with curry.
the most recent research in medicine fascinates me - parasites and probiotics are the future.
I have horrid hayfever so I got a probiotic all the way from New Zealand that the literature claims reduces it almost completely. And it seemed to be much better this last fall. I know, self-reporting, but the literature supports my experience. IGE levels dropping like flies with this probiotic convinced me.
The link that silverleaf posted in 7 gives some promising discussion:
“Rosen’s team hypothesized that they could block S1P1 and the body would still fight the flu virus but without the risk of dangerous inflammation. Indeed, they found that mice treated with a drug that targeted S1P1 survived the flu without showing signs of massive cytokine production and inflammation.”
I was asking tongue clearly in cheek.
The only way you avoid getting exposed to all of the nasties is to have either patients or you end up six feet under.
I had thought from long ago that it was not only the inflammation in the lungs but also the onslaught of white cells, presumably monos and neutrophils that created clogs upon death. So first I need to study up again on the cytokine storm stuff.
I have a lot to learn about this scenario, without a doubt.
Interesting how so much of medicine is about stopping inflammation.
I searched for this and could not find it here in the US. However I did find some in New Zealand. I purchased it online here without any scary things happening to the credit card.
It is available also in France and a few other countries but I was most comfortable ordering it from this place.
Maybe this will be helpful for you. My fall allergy season was far less horrid thanks to this stuff, imo.
http://www.ethnoherbalist.com/benefits-of-elderberry-black-elderberry-syrup-for-colds/
Apparently there is some evidence for it helping against the flu. It regulates cytokines. It also retards the flu virus from replicating, and ups antioxidants that deal with waste products from killing the flu virii. Altogether they seem to work to shorten the duration and intensity of the flu.
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