

Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D - adammichaelc
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51913.php

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CodeMage
_A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the
World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina
combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would
tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the
Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina._

Is anyone else tired of these doomsday prophecies? Everyone was hysterical
about H1N1 and it turned out to be milder than "normal" flu in the end. I'm
not trying to say anything about the rest of the article, I'm just really
tired of the attitude.

It's estimated that, in United States, about 40,000 people a year die in
highway accidents. If we adopted the same sensationalist attitude, we could
compare it to the Vietnam War, which (according to Wikipedia) claimed the
lives of 58,236 US soldiers, over the course of several years. Obviously,
highway accidents will be the doom of United States, right?

Sorry, rant over.

~~~
GiraffeNecktie
Sensationalist attitude? The 1918 influenza epidemic killed an estimated 100
million people at a time when the world was a lot 'smaller' than it is today.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic>

The H5N1 virus is wickedly deadly and treatment options are limited.
Fortunately it hasn't yet mutated into a form that's easily transmitted
between humans.

And then there's the SARS scare which might have been a little over the top
but it had all the right ingredients: high morbidity and highly contagious.

Sorry that you find this stuff tiring but the risks are real.

~~~
CodeMage
I believe that the risks are real, I really do. I'm not disputing that. The
reason why the attitude tiring is because medical issues have been handled
very badly in the last few years. To be honest, it might also be that I
started paying more attention to it in those few years and it has always been
handled badly.

My point is that it's becoming really hard for an average person today to
decide how to react to information from medical field. Every now and then
there's a report of a "new study" which "concludes" this or that about some
disease or condition or disorder. More often than not, the study is not really
a study but a theory, or it's not sound for this or that reason, or it's not
new, or it doesn't really conclude anything yet, etc. Plus, on top of it, you
get stuff like that whole fiasco with vaccines.

What I'm driving at is that the way this stuff is handled makes it really hard
for ordinary people like me to make decisions. If it was just about me, then I
wouldn't worry so much, but my son is three years old and each time a new
"threat" appears, I have to decide what to do.

Finally, regarding the article, was it really necessary to start it that way?
Yes, the risks are real, but how does stating them yet again contribute to the
article?

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wanderr
Aside from the experience in his ward, mostly the other evidence seems to be
the correlation between winter and the spread of influenza. There may be other
causes for that correlation besides vitamin D (or they might all be
contributing factors), such as: -People spend more time indoors, closer to
other people. If the virus is airborne or spread through human contact,
transmission rates would naturally go up in the winter. -People travel during
the holidays so the virus has more opportunity to spread around: more people
trapped in airplanes with sick people, and more sick people moving viruses
from point A to point B.

That said, I'd like to see more evidence and discussion of whether taking
vitamin D supplements are worthwhile, I suspect they are but am not convinced
entirely by this article.

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noelchurchill
Sometimes I want to move out to the country to get away from these types of
risks. And to get away from the traffic, overcrowding, etc...

