[ale] Way OT: X-ray glasses=>Flu shots

[tfreeman at intel.digichem.net]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Jim Popovitch wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 15:45 -0500, Bob Toxen wrote:
> 
> > A flu shot is $30.  Get one!  
> 
> Flu shots are like antibiotics, if you don't start taking them, you
> don't generally need them over and over.  TOO many people needlessly
> take pills based on bad advice from well-intentioned NON-medical folks.
> 
> Give your bod a break: eat right, get plenty of exercise, live healthy
> and your body will do fine on it's own.
> 
> -Jim P.

Another post points it out in greater detail. An antibiotic works against 
bacteria (_not_ viruses, fungi, or amebic type things), and the mode of 
action is a poisen. The bacteria is poisened, to the point of death or 
weakened enough for the body's own defenses to take over. However, the 
natural flora of the body, which you do need to maintain health, can 
become resistant to an antibiotic and sometimes transmit that resistance 
to the invading bacteria. I also understand there is the posibility that 
the natural flora is helping supress the infection, and the antibiotic 
gets the wrong bug resulting in a worse situation.

In general, overuse/misuse of anti-biotics will fairly quickly destroy the 
utility of anti-biotics.

A vacine is generally presenting the body with example protiens from the 
virus or what-ever, to encourage the body to create antibodies to those 
specific protiens, alowing the body to respond to and attempt to destroy 
whatever is attached to the protien. With the flu viruses, this is fairly 
well understood. If the experts identify the correct flu strains for the 
coming year, the flu season can be fairly well shut down early. Apparently 
flu viri don't mutate their protien coats all that quickly. The cold 
virus, if I remember correctly, does shift the nature of it's protien coat 
relatively quickly, making it harder for the body to defend against, and 
making vacine making even trickier to manufacture.

All vacines also carry with them side effects, which are usually not 
noticed but can be serious. For that reason, vaccine manufacture is 
tightly overseen. (Bob is old enough to remember the Epstein-Barr outbreak 
from flu shots back in the Ford Administration.) Since vacine manufacture 
is also something like a nine month process at this time, if one of the 
suppliers flunks an exam late in the process, there is no time to recover 
from the lost of supply. 

I should point out that injection of _any_ protenacious (sp???) substance 
into a living body has the potiential to cause anaphalactic shock. 
Regulators attempt to keep the risk down in the 1/10e9 range, but if you 
are "lucky", you die. I had the pleasure of burying my wife for just that 
reason 18 years ago. 

Fortunately (sort of) we are getting some other anti-viral tools to 
mitigate the problem this year. More expensive and less effective, but 
better than nothing.

-- 
=============================================
If you think Education is expensive
Try Ignorance
                   Author Unknown
============================================