Posted on 01/17/2018 8:36:12 AM PST by Perseverando
A 40-year-old mother in San Jose, Calif., died two days after catching the flu, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing local media.
Katie Denise Oxley Thomas, who was considered healthy and liked to run marathons, died on Jan. 4, the report said. She is the 42nd Californian under the age of 65 to die from the flu, the paper reported.
“I can tell you that she seemed absolutely fine on New Year’s Eve and called a friend Tuesday morning saying that she had a sore throat, and by Wednesday she was in the ICU,” her sister told the Mercury News.
“The doctor was saying that he had never seen anything like this, and it was not supposed to happen,” she said.
The family asked for a private autopsy. Her father believes she had gotten the flu shot, KGO reported.
Thomas had three children from 7 to 17.
Flu is now widespread in every state except Hawaii, but the good news is the season appears to already be peaking.
It’s been a rough few weeks: Hospitals have set up tents to handle patient overflow. Doctors are putting in double and triple shifts. Ambulances have been sidelined while paramedics waited to drop off patients.
“This morning, I couldn’t stand up. I was really weak,” said Margaret Shafer, who went to a Seattle emergency room this week after a bout with the flu was followed by pneumonia.
But an update out Friday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows patient traffic for flu is no longer skyrocketing the way it was in December.
“It looks like it’s starting to level out,” said the CDC’s Lynnette Brammer, who oversees flu tracking.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Snip: "She is the 42nd Californian under the age of 65 to die from the flu, the paper reported."
From healthy to dead in 2 days.
...
Keith Richards and I outlive another younger health fanatic.
Mainstream press is just overrun with stories of people dying from the flu.
Apparently they’ve been cashing checks from the vaccine divisions of Big Pharma again.
The Spanish Flu of 1918 killed a lot of young healthy people. I believe it basically threw their immune system into over-drive and killed them. Younger and older people with less vibrant immune systems just got sick and then they got better. Counter-intuitive, but life is like that sometimes.
If any of you take a biologic ie: Embril, you must get a flu shot and if possible a pneumonia shot.
This is the first time in over 25 years that I have taken a flu shot. Every year I get the flu. This is the first year I haven’t.
The flu shot is a joke
I had an aunt that died from it. Abt 10 years old. What it did was flood the lungs with so much mucus that they drowned.
The cause of death on her was listed as consumption.
I have had this one for 9 weeks counting this week. So much mucus and coughing all the time. It comes back on you also. I will be fine for a week and then its backwards.
BTW, the Dr. I went to said that they told him that this on is just a small ways to becoming the spanish flu.
Take Tamiflu, drink Gatorade, move around.
Sorry, all out. Normally I have at least a couple of pints left on the shelf by the time spring rolls around. This time I was wiped out by New Years.
And we are not even the worse hit state.
She may not have been all that healthy. Many runners are excessively skinny. They’re at a higher risk of death.
I recall reading up on the Spanish flu, and some guy had done the research to find this one story. The father had come home from work fairly sick, and by sunlight of the next day, the wife found him dead in the bed. She shuffled the two kids off without telling them of the father’s death and called over a neighbor to get a doctor to come out. She was pretty sick by the time the kids came home, and she died by the middle of the next day.
Some of us were around for the Swine Flu debacle of 1975.
The government put out the alert that an epidemic on the scale of 1918 was coming. They put the full-court press on for vaccinations.
Long story short, the Swine Flu never arrived.
But plenty of people died or became disabled from the shots.
“From healthy to dead in 2 days.”
She was detrrmined to kill herself one way or the other.
Couldn’t help noticing this part:
“Her father believes she had gotten the flu shot”
There is no universal flu vaccine.
The vaccine’s effectiveness is dependent upon what ‘strain’ of the flu is actually going around.
When the vaccines are prepared for an upcoming season, the mfrs have to literally ‘guess’ what it will be. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don’t. But it’s best to get the shots anyway if you are elderly.
This year’s flu and last years flu seem to have been more apt to kill younger folks than older ones, for some odd reason.
Maybe it’s because older folks get the flu shots and are more immune?..........................
I noticed that too - that she had gotten the flu shot. I remember the Swine Flu too. Did not get a vax this time, and I work with kids. I think that boosts my immune system to the skies, frankly. They have all been sick since about Thanksgiving, but I have not. Thank you Lord.
Stop gloating.But I must admit Keith is some kind of miracle.
There were two major waves of the Spanish Flu. The first hit in the spring of 1918, then again in late summer, at least in the United States. The first round killed mostly the young and elderly, as most flu outbreaks hit these groups the hardest. The second wave killed the healthy and strong, in the cytokine storm you described where the immune system overwhelms the body.
However research is ongoing and the source and mechanism of the pandemic is still being debated. The Wikipedia article I used to check my memory indicates that overcrowding and sanitary conditions may have been to blame.
I find the topic fascinating because the outbreak of the Spanish Flu was like a real zombie apocalypse, or some Twilight Zone episode where the calls of “Bring out your dead” returned from the Middle Ages.
CDC reports that the strain of the current flu-shot is not equivalent to the influenza we are contracting this year.
Asked my pharmacist whether the flu shot is 100% and he could GUARANTEE that I would not contract influenza.
He laughed, I walked.
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