
Flu Research Once Banned Because It Was Deemed Too Dangerous Is Set to Resume - DocFeind
https://weather.com/health/cold-flu/news/2019-03-05-flu-research-banned-too-dangerous-to-resume
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sigi45
It's not that big of a deal apparently. Our public transport doesn't has any
kind of filter system and because of that I'm sick every year for 3-7 days...

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morningmoon
I always wear a face mask on public transit for this reason.

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sigi45
Not common here at all. I'm also not the kind of person who will start it.

But yes i like the idea but would prefer proper filter technic :)

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parliament32
Anecdotal, but: I used to get the flu shot every year, and like clockwork got
the flu every year a few weeks after the shot. About 5 years ago I just
stopped getting the shot and... haven't had the flu since, despite spending
time with people with the flu.

Other vaccines are great, this is specifically about the annual "flu shot"
that's being pushed so hard every fall in ads/media: I'm pretty convinced that
it either weakens my immune system too much or is just released too late to be
effective.

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wincy
Last year, my wife and I found out she was pregnant. We were very excited
about this. Unfortunately, she got the flu after a couple weeks of being
pregnant. In October, my wife gave birth to a little baby girl. We’d had the
anatomy scans but they missed the open hole in her back. She has Spina Bifida,
a condition that’s thought to occur due to a failure of spinal formation
around the 18th day of pregnancy. Normally it’s blamed on a folate deficiency,
but it can also happen due to illness during pregnancy. She’s coming home
tomorrow, as she’s been in the hospital all these long months. It’s been a
very emotional and challenging several months.

I’m almost certain the flu vaccine would have prevented this as I had gotten
the flu vaccine and she had not. Only she got sick. We’ll never know for sure
what caused it, because that’s just not how this kind of thing works, but our
daughter is looking at a life of having to give herself catheters and enemas
and likely kidney failure in her 60s because of her condition.

If we could go back in time she’d have gotten that vaccine in a heartbeat. It
just hadn’t occurred to her as a thing to do.

Edit: accidentally repeated myself

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acct1771
Why are you sure of this? Doesn't seem reasonable, given the expected
effectiveness of the inoculation is "this will cover the majority of this
class of illness in humans this year - hopefully".

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wincy
Because my wife who hadn’t gotten the vaccine, got the flu. I got the vaccine
and did not get the flu despite being around her through her illness. I’m not
sure how I could be more clear, sorry.

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JadeNB
Is weather.com a news site, too, now? I thought they were just for banners
advertising disasters (and occasional weather forecasts).

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S_A_P
Anecdata I know. I have gotten a flu vaccine for the past 5 years, and always
got some sort of really bad cold/possible flu. This year, I skipped the flu
shot. Guess what, I had a house full of people with confirmed flu(and all of
them got flu shots except for me) and I was the only one who did not get the
flu. Dont confuse this with my taking an anti-vax stance. My opinion is that
either the vaccines we are getting for flu are saline, for the wrong flu
strain, or are improperly prepared at scale and dont seem to work.

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pmoriarty
Flu vaccines simply increase your immune system's reaction to particular
variants of the flu virus. It doesn't mean you can't get the flu, but if you
do your symptoms are likely to be milder than they otherwise would be (unless
you happen to get a different variety of flu than the one the vaccine was
targeted at).

Also, one single person's experiences with the flu vaccine are not much to go
on when making conclusions about the effectiveness of the flu vaccine for
millions or billions of people.

Just to provide a counterexample, my own experience has been that I used to
never get the flu vaccine, and once got so sick with the flu that I thought I
was going to die (later I learned that some people actually do die from the
flu). Then I started getting the vaccine every year, and since then I mostly
didn't get the flu, but in the years I did my symptoms have been relatively
mild and short-lived -- it usually lasts a day, and I don't feel like I'm
going to die; instead, I just get some weakness and muscle aches.

Another thing to consider is that there may be other reasons for getting sick
or not, apart from your vaccination status. I used to have a poor diet and
some nutrient deficiencies, but since I improved my diet and started taking
supplements like vitamin D and B12, I very rarely get sick. I think my immune
system is probably just generally stronger than it used to be.

So to really make solid conclusions about the effectiveness of flu vaccines,
you not only have to study large groups of people, but you also have to
control for all the other factors that could potentially influence how
frequently and how severely people get sick from the flu.

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privateSFacct
I hate getting sick. It's hard to take time off, so even if I stay home I'm
working hard and late and it's hard to get over being sick. I get sick maybe
once a year or every other year - and even that feels like way too much.

I would pay $2K to avoid the flu / colds each year.

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duxup
I'd pay more for my kids. I miss a lot more work because of them being sick.

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sametmax
I have a hard time understanding the benefit of putting flu related medicine.
They have benefit for a very very limited part of very weak population, and
even for children and old people, the flu rarely dangerous, and when it is,
not more than the 1000 other stuff that could hurt them.

In the end, I feel like it's more an economic reason we pursue this: a lot of
people get the flu often, so it's a large market.

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ksenzee
Last flu season (2017-2018) 80,000 people in the US died of influenza. It's a
real public health problem, not just an inconvenience.

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mikeash
That’s more deaths than guns and cars killed last year combined. And think
about how much time and effort goes into reducing those.

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magduf
I have to disagree about this one. Cars, sure: we try to engineer cars to
protect people better in crashes, we invent devices to try to help avoid
crashes (e.g., blind-spot warning systems), we try to make roads safer, etc.
Guns, no. Some people do vote for politicians who might push for laws limiting
guns, but in office they don't do much because there just isn't enough broad
political will to do so, because the voters really don't want to do anything
about the issue because roughly half the population doesn't want any kind of
new limits on gun ownership at all.

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mikeash
A major function of law enforcement is preventing murders (and to a lesser
extent suicides), which includes those performed with a gun. That’s a lot of
time and effort spent.

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everdev
If by preventing you mean capturing killers after the fact and punishing them
as a deterrent, yes.

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sametmax
Prison doesn't work as a deterrent for most crimes. It's useful to keep the
honest population honest, and separate the dishonest one from the rest during
a time.

