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My Wife and I are in your late 80's. This years when planning to get an annual Flu Shot we were asked to get an RSV also. We did get out Flu Shot yesterday but no RSV was available. Was that a SIGN ? Would a FReeper(s) with some knowledge contribute to this discussion?

OAKLAND, Calif. - Mask mandates are returning to several Bay Area counties as an increase in COVID-19 cases overlaps with the cold and flu season. The local health orders require masks to be worn in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and other healthcare facilities, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Napa counties have reinstated the mask requirements.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Friday it has approved the first flu vaccine that can be self-administered, with this version being a nasal spray as opposed to an injection. The vaccine FluMist, manufactured by MedImmune, which was acquired by AstraZeneca in 2007, was first approved by the FDA in 2003 for individuals between five and 49 years of age. Its approval has since been expanded to include children as young as two years old. With the FDA’s announcement Friday, FluMist is officially the first flu vaccine that can be administered without a healthcare provider’s involvement. The spray contains...

A new flu vaccine candidate incorporates proteins from 8 strains of influenza

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday it is updating their recommendations for the 2024-2025 COVID-19 and flu vaccines this fall and winter season. For the COVID-19 vaccination, the CDC said it now recommends everyone ages six months and older receive an updated 2024-2025 vaccine to protect against the potentially dangerous outcomes of the virus. Updated vaccines will be available from Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax later this year. The CDC said it recommends everyone ages six months and older, with rare exceptions, receive an updated 2024-2025 flu vaccine. September and October remain the best times to get vaccinated,...

Finland has broken new ground as the inaugural nation to commence bird flu vaccinations for human beings, as divulged by health officials this Tuesday.The forward-thinking Nordic nation will make preemptive bird flu vaccines available from next week to specific workers who are exposed to animals. Finland secured vaccines for 10,000 individuals, with each person receiving two doses. This purchase forms part of an expansive EU procurement of up to 40 million doses shared amongst 15 countries.CSL Seqirus, the Australian vaccine manufacturer behind these doses, confirmed to Reuters that Finland holds the honour of being the first nation to implement this...

A rare flu variant that has shown some resistance to the most commonly used antiviral treatment has been detected in at least two people in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Influenza viruses are constantly changing, but this variant has two concerning mutations in places that could lower the effectiveness of treatment with oseltamivir phosphate, known by the brand name Tamiflu. “There’s active global surveillance going on looking for these mutations,” said Dr. Andy Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We want to know when they come...

Australia has implemented lockdowns on farms due to bird flu outbreaks. Specifically, in the state of Victoria, more than 500,000 chickens have been euthanized, and strict quarantine zones have been established to restrict the movement of birds and equipment. The highly pathogenic H7N3 strain of avian influenza has been detected on four farms, while another virus, H7N9, has been found on a fifth property over the past seven weeks. As part of sweeping biosecurity controls, at least 580,000 birds have been destroyed.

Response (ASPR) at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said officials are moving forward with a plan to produce 4.8 million doses of H5N1 avian flu vaccine for pandemic preparedness. Dawn O'Connell, JD, said health officials have identified a manufacturing line at one of its manufacturing partners for fill-and-finish steps, without disrupting production of seasonal flu vaccine. Currently, the vaccine is in bulk form and will be produced in multidose vials. She said it takes a couple months to fill and finish the vaccine doses, which would save time in case a vaccine is needed. Federal health...

A farmworker in Michigan is the second person to become infected with the current H5N1 bird flu virus. The farmworker had mild symptoms and has since recovered, local health officials said. According to Michigan’s chief medical executive, Natasha Bagdasarian, the current health risk to the public remains low, but the virus has circulated in dairy and poultry farms across the country this spring. Here’s what we know about the bird flu infections.

Mainstream media has been covering bird flu incessantly for weeks. It has been compared to COVID-19 and even the Bubonic plague with talking head “doctors” practically declaring it to be the next pandemic. Whether their concern is real or part of an election year operation is debatable, but what has become crystal clear is that Americans are viewing the sudden bird flu attention from government agencies as a reason to stock up on long-term storage beef. “The beef industry is undeniably under attack,” said JD Rucker, CEO of Prepper All-Naturals. “Whatever risk, if any, that bird flu poses to cattle...

Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more likely to die than those hospitalized with influenza during the fall and winter of 2023-2024, according to an analysis of Veterans Affairs data. Among over 11,000 patients hospitalized for either illness during this past fall and winter, 5.7% of patients with COVID-19 died within 30 days of admission versus 4.24% of patients with influenza, reported Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, of the VA St. Louis Health Care System, and colleagues. email article A photo of a nurse in full protective gear at the bedside of an intubated COVID patient in the ICU. Patients hospitalized with COVID-19...

The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses. And an official of the World Health Organization’s European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International’s research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria. “At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present,” medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark. “But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau.” The...

A bird flu pandemic could be '100 times worse than Covid' and kill up to half of everyone it infects, experts have warned — as the White House says it is 'monitoring' the situation. Speaking at a briefing, virus researchers said the H5N1 strain of bird flu may now be getting 'dangerously close' to triggering a pandemic. Multiple cases of the infection in a variety of mammals, including cows, cats and, more recently, humans, are all raising the risk of the virus mutating to become more transmissible, they said. But others attending the briefing said it was too early to...

It’s just the flu, bro…year 5 (a thread for Flubros and Flubras) Four years ago we started this series of threads based on the premise that…it’s just the flu, bro. Essentially that Covid is just the flu. It should have been nothing more, from an impact point of view, nothing more than a bad flu season. The symptoms, treatment, prevention techniques for Covid were all similar to that of the flu. We present as evidence… https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2024/p0301-respiratory-virus.html an excerpt- “The new guidance brings a unified approach to addressing risks from a range of common respiratory viral illnesses, such as COVID-19, flu,...

So, what the hell did we go through all of this for? I expected another wave of either anger or hilarity regarding the new guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued earlier this month about COVID: we can pretty much treat this viral infection like the flu. Remember, it was not long ago that even uttering such a thing could land you in social media jail or be branded a science denier. The footnote for the COVID pandemic will be that the people were right, and the experts were wrong. Masking is grossly ineffective. The vaccine is...

he nation's top public health agency is expanding a program that tests international travelers for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program asks arriving international passengers to volunteer to have their noses swabbed and answer questions about their travel. The program operates at six airports and on Tuesday, the CDC said it was adding two more — Chicago's O'Hare and Miami. Those locations should provide more information about respiratory infections coming out of South America, Africa and Asia, particularly, CDC officials said. "Miami and Chicago enable us to collect samples coming from areas of...

Corporation cited for illegal religious discrimination.. A hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., has agreed to pay a settlement to a job applicant who had been offered a position, but then was arbitrarily rejected because he declined to take a flu shot hospital officials demanded. ... The fight involved Trinity Health Grand Rapids, which previously was known as Mercy Health St. Mary's. The resolution includes a consent decree that allows paying of some $50,000 to the worker who was rejected. The case originally was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and charged the hospital improperly denied a job applicant’s...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday mothballed its longstanding COVID isolation guidance, announcing that people no longer need to isolate for five days after catching the coronavirus. Instead, per the CDC, they should stay home if they feel sick but can leave home and resume normal activities as soon as their symptoms are getting better and its been a day since they had a fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication). That means that the CDC is now both streamlining and simplifying its recommendations and advising people to treat their COVID infections like they would the flu...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) quietly updated its federal COVID-19 guidelines to recommend treating the virus similarly to the flu, vindicating years of dissident opinion and undermining the original justification for drastically upending Americans’ lives in its name. Declaring that COVID is “no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses,” the new guidance says COVID’s threat is now “more similar to that of other common respiratory viruses,” justifying the agency’s decision to issue a general “Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.” It...