Flu season

Just as a warning, I am starting this post feeling mad and a little smug. It's because of new stories on the unusually bad flu season and the shortage of flu shots. Why is there a shortage of flu shots? Because people wait until we are in the middle of an unusually bad season, and then they want it.

Obviously the reason for my smugness is that I had my shot months ago. The anger is because I can't help but wonder whether more people getting their shots early may have kept this from being an unusually bad flu season.

I am more sensitive on the issue right now because I recently read about a measles outbreak in Pakistan. There is no reason for there to be measles outbreaks in this day and age, and now there are hundreds of children dead because of it.

Now, in this particular case, a big part of the problem was government inefficiency in program administration. A common problem in the region is popular resistance to immunization programs because they are viewed as Western plots. It's unfortunate, but there are cultural and educational issues that are hard to get around. You would think that we should not have this kind of issue in the United States, leader of the free world, but there is strong anti-vaccination sentiment, and a lot of stupidity defending it.

I don't know if there were earlier issues - as far as I know, everyone was thrilled to have smallpox and polio out of the picture - but a lot of the concerns started with a 1998 study linking autism to the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine. This is the part that kills me; the study was a fraud:

http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20110105/bmj-wakefield-autism-faq

The testing pool was not assembled well, it was not an exhaustive sample, data was changed and falsified, co-authors repudiated the study, and The Lancet formally retracted it. How did all this happen? Well, the person behind the study, Andrew Wakefield (who has lost his medical license!), was acting as a paid consultant to lawyer who was suing vaccine makers.

The result was a great deal of fear, and measles once again became endemic in the UK and other parts of Europe, because someone lied for money. I know, my issues with greed usually go in the main blog. Actually, so do my issues with ignorance. However, there seems to be a point about preparedness here.

So, what about the flu shot? Well, people have raised concerns about that, especially regarding links to Epstein Barr Virus. I remember a lot of noise about it during the big H1N1 year, and I read a lot, and the anit-vaccination crowd never had very good backup.

One case got a lot of publicity, and then she recovered, and even if her symptoms had been a close match to EBV, which they were not, her quick recovery (even before her blood was chelated) clearly indicated that was not it. And that should be great, except that at one point Jenny McCarthy and the "doctors" on that side were all being her friends, and suddenly they stopped, which I am sure was very hurtful.

Okay, yes, the flu shot is not the success story of polio, because the flu is an ever-changing diverse creature, and it is not even possible to provide a blanket immunity to all flu. At the same time, it saves lives. It saves time lost due to sickness. It saves heartache. That isn't just for those who get sick; it is also for those around them.

With the MMR vaccine, you have a 98% chance of becoming a immune. With the flu show, your odds go down to 68%. It is still worthwhile. It is worthwhile getting it early, before people start getting panicky and scared and supplies run out. People were scared with H1N1, and supplies were low, but nonetheless things were not as bad as they could have been, and that was due largely to efforts on the part of the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Let's not make their jobs harder.

And yes, by all means, wash your hands frequently, cough into your arm instead of your hands, and do things to prevent the transmission of germs. Live a healthy lifestyle with a good diet, and adequate rest, fluids, and exercise - that has benefits far beyond flu prevention.

But don't give in to ignorance that was started by greed and perpetuated by self-righteousness and magical thinking and distrust of science. Yes, modern medicine is not perfect, but it's done a lot of good things and the flu shot is one of them.

For more on influenza in general, I strongly recommend The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu by Mike Davis.