Swine Flu/H1n1 (whatever) should change travel plans

Well, geez. Somebody's got to be first and hey, you work with with kids all the time. You owe it to them.

They have my heart and brain.

That's all the little smeggers get.

A sore arm for a couple of days.

Not everyone needs to get the vaccine, if a high enough percentage of the people around you have the vaccine, you really don't have to.

On the other hand.... you shouldn't count on other people. You all go and get those shots right away (especially those of you in easter Massachusetts).

Based on the low number of people who say they plan on getting the vaccine, counting on other people is not a good choice in this case.

Less so than from the other seasonal flu shots, I say garnering the wisdom of my braver colleagues.

I was going worst-case scenario.

Another side effect: Not getting the damn flu!

I remember reading about this... I think the percentage (there is a term for the threshold of people who need to be immunized that I can't remember right now) is pretty low.

I don't have time to google this right now... but they aren't pushing the vaccine too hard right now which makes me think the people in the know aren't too worried.

Yeah, but severe or comparable to the seasonal flu, people are still dying from it.

Heartbreaking to hear about a kid dying. Scary as hell to hear they did everything right and the kid still died.

Huh? That is a non-sequitur if I have ever read one.

The world is a scary place where kids die no matter what we do. This is true flu or no flu. Kids die in car crashes, in football games and with unforeseen heart defects.

I don't see what this has to do with the flu shot. You have presented no rational evidence that taking the flu shot has any significant impact on the chance that someone will die.

Let me make the argument a bit more directly.

DrewDad, I assume you don't have your kids wearing surgical masks in public (although surgical masks are effective enough required in some setting such as hospitals emergency rooms).

Make an argument for getting the vaccine that couldn't be made for having your kids wear a surgical mask.

You yourself pointed out that other people getting the shot reduces your chance of getting the flu.

If you don't catch the flu, you can't die from the flu.

So, getting the flu shot protects you, and it protects others.


Very poor logic.

1. The fact that there are other risks does not affect whether there are things one can do to mitigate this risk.
2. If you follow that argument to its logical conclusion, then life always ends in death, so what's the point of worrying about anything? Why not just go play in traffic?

1. The vaccine is much more effective than wearing a surgical mask.
2. The vaccine is much less intrusive than wearing a surgical mask.

This is really a silly argument. Are you one of those wacko alt-med, anti-vaccination people?

Indeed.


And a damn fine one it is.

They are pushing it bloody hard here. More so when there is more vaccine available, I suspect.

Herd immunity.

They're not going to have any until mid-month and those are only for health care workers. For the general public - not available to some time in November.

I am not anti-immunization. I am anti-hysteria.

The key word is significant-- as in whether taking and action will significantly reduce the chance that something bad will happen to you (compared to the cost of doing so).

You seem to understand this... you seem to think that this immunization does significantly decrease your chance of disaster (which is why you think it is worthwhile). You also evidently understand (since you think it is silly) that wearing a face mask does not significantly decrease your chance of getting sick (although surely it does reduce it some small amount).

So the question is how to judge significance.

The fact is that there are lots of very important things that you can do to address the flu. They are prominently being pushed by the CDC. They include:

- hand washing
- keeping kids home if they have a fever.
- cough/sneeze hygiene
- etc.

It seems to me that public health officials aren't pushing the H1N1 flu shot to the general public too urgently. This would seem to imply that

1. Hand washing, keeping kids home with a fever and cough hygiene is more effective than having everyone take the vaccine.
2. Hand washing, keeping kids home with a fever and cough hygiene is less intrusive than having everyone take the vaccine.

I tend to be for immunization, but not always - if vaccines are scarce, then some groups are more reasonable to give shots (shots are the mode recently) to than others. I'm an eye roller at a lot of immunization hysteria, having spent years working in the immunology field. I'm so long away from that field, that I can't spout data, but in my lifetime I've seen immunization do a lot of good.

I've also been mostly an eye roller about swine flu hysteria. Or H1N1 flu, the preferred name. Not that getting that flu is nothing, it can certainly ruin your week, or, I'm guessing, month - but the kangaroo hasn't jumped the lake (I'm avoid the frog jumping the pond). The virulence isn't up there.... yet.
Virulence - http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=6911

Doing the old soft shoe..
I was born at the beginning of the forties, a month before Pearl Harbor, but when much of the world was already dealing with war.
Diphtheria worry and tuberculosis and poliomyelitis (I had two classmates who died of polio) were the thing in the US, but cholera, typhus, on and on, were prevalent elsewhere. Malaria they're still working on, resistant tb too. Back then, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever (I had it) were ordinary. I had a cousin die of measles, at 43.

Meantime, most of my friends when I was a beginning adult wanted to explore. I've early peace corps acquaintances/friends/relatives. They just took their shots.
I took mine, before the first bacteriology path class, not like theirs, when they went to africa for two years.

Travel is a concept in itself. Many travelers are out there to look around, and at the back of their minds trouble may happen, but they will have been on an adventure to them, living and looking, and they'll perhaps not be nonchalant, but fatalistic about setting forth. A2k's Mathis, for example. Algys, Dag, many others. Mame. Remember J B, the chinese guy? He was brave, in a way. Realjohnboy walked the walk.

Taking airplanes to ensured safety is, to me, not always travel, it's vacationizing. Not that I haven't ever done that.
On the other side, it is not dumb to worry about the health of your children.
I may be wrong again and we're facing a virulent pandemic of pan flu.

I think it comes down to how you live life and there are points for various sides on that. Your family/friends are cautious, Linkat. Seems like a cautious choice would be smart if you all want to get together.