Posted on 11/24/2012 1:04:13 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
CINCINNATI — One of Cincinnati’s largest employers fired approximately 150 employees Wednesday for failing to get a required flu shot.
TriHealth offered all of its 10,800 employees free flu shots. Employees had a month to get the flu shot. The deadline was Nov. 16. Employees who did not get the shot were terminated Wednesday, a company spokesperson said...
(Excerpt) Read more at wlwt.com ...
And, just like global warming, the answer will always be ‘needs more study!’. We will never know the answer though since they hide all the data AND the methods. Clever that. Very trustworthy.
You can guarantee there will NEVER be a government funded study that finds ANY vaccine is unnecessary. At least not while the treasury can pay for them. Your broken hip at age 70? good luck granny, hope they allow medical tourism!
How on earth would you know that without doing blood work on all snifflers? In the winter that could be VERY pricey and inconvenient. There are over 200 viruses that cause almost the exact same symptoms. Good luck with that!
Depends on who you ask. If you had asked Rosalee back in 1953, she probably would have taken the chance.
Years later, I had to have a Tetanus shot, became ill, arm swelled was red and hot and was told never to have another Tetanus shot.
If it wasn't for that, I would take the flu shot because I am old and to protect myself during flu season, I stay away from crowds, move away from anyone I see sneeze or cough, stay at home as much as possible, and if I have to go out, I wash my hands thoroughly when I get home and also carry antiseptic sheets in packets to use while I'm out if I have to touch anything I suspect could be covered with harmful bacteria.
For people like you with medical problems that contraindicate vaccinations, it is even more important that people like me who have normal, healthy immune systems receive our vaccines.
I will give you a bit of advice (even though I'm a PhD not an MD). The flu is contagious before people show symptoms, and the virus is airborne. Get some surgical masks and wear them when you have to go out. When you remove the mask, put it directly into the trash and wash your hands. You didn't say if you carry around hand sanitizers, but it's a good idea to have them. Other than that, I think you are doing a good job protecting yourself.
Let’s ask my HS chem teacher who died of a brain tumor.
Yes, they did a study comparing vitamin d to placebo, but they only gave the study kids 1200 iu! Imagine how much better the results would have been if they gave them 4000 iu. (The placebo kids did have double the cases as it was, but I would bet very few would even catch the flu with a therapeutic dose.
Here is how I figured dosing a child of average size (for this purpose, call average size wearing the size clothing that matches his age). From birth, one drop on mom’s or bottle nipple of 400 iu a day. Double if ill. From 2, 1000 iu a day, double if acutely ill. From 4, 2000 iu a day. From 6, 4000 iu a day until puberty, then 5000 iu a day or get tested until your blood registers at least 50. Adults should be tested. I need 10,000 iu a day.
We don’t get sick and we do get exposed to all kids of flus and colds.
Measles deaths decreased in the US because of better healthcare. Better sanitation, etc., did not affect the incidence of measles because it is transmitted through the air. The incidence of measles decreased when a vaccine was made available. Unfortunately, because of the plethora of anti-vax activists these days, the vaccination rate is dropping and more people are getting measles. In the US, measles kills about 1 out of 1000 of its victims, and there is a chance of permanent brain damage in survivors. Worldwide, a couple of hundred thousand die of measles every year.
You are right, you cannot compare health outcomes between third world hellholes and the US. Children who are starving, malnourished, and living in dirty conditions sometimes do not respond to vaccinations even if they receive them. They are also more likely to die when they acquire an infectious disease; I believe over 6 million children below the age of five die every year. While that situation is tragic and horrible and desperately needs to be corrected, discussing the health care challenges of Africa or Asia really is outside the scope of this thread.
The idea that you will somehow be more healthy by getting the disease than getting a vaccine to prevent it may be popular on anti-vax websites, but it really has no factual basis. Some vaccine-preventable diseases cause permanent disability. Brain-damage, limb deformity, deafness, blindness: all can be caused by diseases whose absence we now take for granted. Some polio survivors lived out their lives in iron lungs because polio destroyed their ability to breathe... what kind of life is that?
We homeschool and live below 35N. Recess is every day at 11:30 for ~20 min. Just like when I was in school in the stone age. Unless it’s below 40, over 100 or raining. Haven’t had the kids D tested though. We’re part NA so they’re darkish to begin with. Our ENT suggested the D3 in olive oil drops if you can believe it. We do 500iu/day for the kids and 5000iu/day for the adults. I have had my levels tested and the sun wasn’t doing the job (tan skin) so I had to add the supps.
I do agree they should have had a couple more study dosages at least. There might be a plateau effect somewhere.
There are two fundamental problems with your premise:
1. You are absolutely convinced that flu shots work - I'm not, in fact I'm not even sure they don't make things worse.
2. You also infer that my not getting the flu is because I have never been exposed to it since everyone else is getting their shots - complete and utter bullsh@t! Do you know what a million miler is? I'm a million miler on American, Delta, and US Air (and was on Eastern as well). And for most of the last 30 years I've attended 3 or more trade shows a year where I work the booth. Try three days of meeting and shaking hands with people from all over the world. I've also worked in an engineering firm where 11 of the 17 employees came down with the flu in 1999, and 9 of the 14 employees came down with the flu in 2006. And surprise, surprise, surprise, after 2006 the company stopped encouraging people to get flu shots. If I haven't been exposed to the flu at least 50-80 times in the last 30 years, THEN NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN EXPOSED TO THE FLU.
And as far as “what if everyone else stopped” my opinion would be - great. Except for drug company profits, I seriously doubt any good is coming from it.
The packets I carry are hand sanitizers and I have a small bottle of the liquid in my purse during the winter.
I have boxes of surgical masks.
I never go to Walmart - too many people in there and in winter with people going to the pharmacy, the store is a bacteria’s/virus’s dream.
I go to Kroger where I seldom see a kid and there is seldom a crowd. Tuesday before Thanksgiving was the most people I have seen in there.
So, keeping healthy, depends a lot on location, location, location (just like in real estate).
Measles is also undergoing genomic shift. As is Mumps. Just like pertussis. The closer you get to 100% vax rates for any given disease the more likely you are to see genomic drift.
We got very lucky with smallpox. It’s amazing that since we wiped out smallpox with vaccination (and not even 100% vax rates either) we have been not only unable to do the same with *other* disease like measles but are falling behind the evolutionary curve with ‘ordinary’ things like pertussis.
We’re better off learning to *treat* diseases. All biological warfare is really chemical warfare. If we fight the bugs, they always fight back with genetic drift. Always.
I didn’t hear the ‘better off having the disease’ from an anti vax website. I actually heard it from a former coworker (A PhD/MD) who interned at a prestigious agency in Atlanta (not cdc btw, even more prestigious than that). Vaccine immunity wears off much faster than disease immunity. Known fact. It’s why they’re having to re-vax huge segments of the population with tetanus. And teens with the chickenpox vaccine. Said former coworker burst my vaccine trust bubble in a big way. He was VERY much against the HepB mandate for neonates. His fear was resistant strains. Taiwan has been vaxing for 20+ years as a standard newborn treatment. Already 25% of the HepB infections there are ‘vaccine resistant’ strains. That number was ~7% when they started the program. Like Jeff Goldblum said, ‘life happens’.
There’s scuttlebutt that we’ll all have to get the MMR(V) as well. Little birdy tells me that measles immunity might max out at about 10 years for enough people that we will have to be revaxed at some point in our adulthood. Possibly multiple times. If true, then our ideas of ‘herd immunity’ will have to change. Those ideas were based on a herd of disease immunized individuals. Not vaccine immunized individuals. T1 and T2 are different responses.
Flu is tested, but it is cost-prohibitive to test every single person for flu. People who don't go to the doctor don't get tested; only a portion of those who make outpatient visits are tested. Those who end up hospitalized are always tested. Out of necessity, the number of people who get the flu and do not seek medical attention *must* be estimated through various methods; there simply is no way to count them. But, for the other flu patients, statistical analyses are completely adequate for deriving the number of flu cases. For the purpose of documenting flu incidence, all patients visiting certain facilities and who meet certain criteria are tested. From that, the incidence of flu is determined and used to extrapolate the number of flu cases among all patients in that area presenting with flu like symptoms. If you examined the CDC weekly flu link I provided earlier, that is how they determine those numbers.
The WNV rates are determined only from people who seek medical attention. To get a full picture of WNV incidence, a statistically significant number of the general population in the outbreak area needs to be tested for seroconversion, and the seroconversion rate can be used to estimate how many cases there actually were. It could be that everyone who gets WNV is so sick they go to the doctor, but there could also be a large number of people who never get that sick. I don't know, because I haven't read everything about the current WNV outbreak, and the seroconversion studies take a while to conduct anyway. Flu rates are also determined through seroconversion studies.
The public health data is not typically publicized, but it's available through the CDC site, and more detailed study reports are databased in PubMed. The methodology is also available through those agencies. Nothing is deliberately hidden about methodologies or disease rates; the CDC wants that information to be available because very few researchers or medical professionals actually work for the CDC, but they need that information.
“it’s available through the CDC site, and more detailed study reports are databased in PubMed. The methodology is also available through those agencies. Nothing is deliberately hidden about methodologies or disease rates; the CDC wants that information to be available because very few researchers or medical professionals actually work for the CDC, but they need that information.”
In fact, it is NOT available. To anyone. By any means. The 36000 number was NOT made available via ANY information in anything databased in pubmed. You can get the number, 36000. Nothing more. No background information. No raw data, no epidemiological methodology information. Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
People who HAVE asked are told ‘national security’ prohibits their getting ahold of this information.
That number, 36000, was pulled out with the rest of her toe jam.
In short, the criteria used for ‘flu death’ is a matter of ‘national security’ and no one is able to discern exactly what the criteria was. So you just have to trust them. In spite of the fact that the head of the CDC when that ‘study’ was done is now the head of Mercks vaccine division.
Um. yeah.
Thanks. Interesting thread. Thanks to all posters.
Old enough to be a HS teacher? Rosalee was EIGHT.
I’m with you - have eschewed the flu shots most of my life and always get sicker during the seasons I got the shot. Huge profit making scheme with little efficacy.
First of all, no I am not a doctor and never claimed to be one. The MD in my screen name stands for Maryland as in “Maryland Expat In Pennsylvania”. Next, you are the one who does not understand how vaccinations work.
When a person is properly vaccinated, the vaccine stops the illness before it starts, and even when those who are vaccinated are exposed to the disease, they will either not be contagious at all or will be so for a much shorter time and generally with a milder form of the disease.
In other words, an immunized health care worker is just as likely to spread a virus. And I seriously doubt that a health care worker with Rubella or Pertussis would be "on the job".
Wrong. Immunized people are very much less likely to spread a virus for which they have been vaccinated for. This is why Herd Immunity works to some extent; if enough people are, people who are not vaccinated and those who have been vaccinated but have not yet reached full immunity are somewhat more protected. Also consider that with many diseases, the infected person can transmit the disease before they themselves become symptomatic or sick enough to stay home.
Bravo for you. I wish you complete success in your efforts to avoid the flu!
Good luck getting them to pay for that test. D3 is cheap, effective, BUT there is no money in it for the 'right people'. People want vaccines? Fine with me. I'll stick with what works for me.
This is Naziism.
I am surprised it has taken this long for that reference to pop up...'death panels', dead ahead.
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