But the swine flu WASN'T a big problem and we don't know the kind of side effects that viruses have until we have studied their use for years, no?
So why would you insist that someone who is not likely to contract a virus and is in good general health inject the virus into their body?
Or am I terribly mistaken? I've always thought that the vaccine IS the virus just a milder version (in laymans terms)
What looks insane to me is to take a virus you are not likely to contract and inject it into your body to build up your immune system "just in case" you catch it.
That seems very stupid in my opinion.
Would you inject a milder version of HIV into your system to help you create what's needed to fight the infection? Let's put it that way? If you are not likely to contract the virus only an idiot would do that IMO.
Of course I'm sure I'm misunderstood so I'm happily sitting here waiting for someone to make it make sense. I'd love to have this explained more fully to me. Because honestly it doesn't make any sense why you would get angry at someone for not doing what you choose for your body.
Also please keep in mind that I do think that if I were in a situation that would make it likely to contract the virus I would definitely take the vaccine. (also as I pointed out, my kids have had regular immunizations) However what is the likelihood that my kids will contract the swine flu, and on top of that what is the likelihood that it will be very serious for them to recover? Compare that to the potential problems that include "dumb people giving the injections who screw up for some reason" and to me the second threat is more real and serious than the first.
Especially because your body is designed to defend itself against infection.
And
exhibit A
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFluNews/school-staffers-insulin-swine-flu-shot/story?id=9606504
If you think that a flu that is three times as deadly to children and pregnant women and killed far more children and pregnant women, directly killed patients, rather than the typical 40 - 50, 000 elderly or immune compromised people who sometimes die of complications from the flu, I guess it wasn't that bad.
We have studied influenza A viruses for years, we know how antigenic drift works, which is why there is often such a grave concern about it.
We are long overdue a global pandemic like the Spanish flu in the 1920s.
In the first 25 years of HIV/AIDs, 25 million people have died.
In the first 25 weeks of the 1918 flu, 25 million people died.
The population of the world was much lower at that time, and there also wasn't the same sort of global transport.
The flu virus isn't a live or attenuated virus, it is a subunit of the virus, so it is impossible to catch the flu.
Your immune system is going to do EXACTLY the same thing encountering the antigens from the vaccine or encountering the antigens on the wild virus.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Spanish flu pandemic is that it killed young, healthy people (those with a 'strong' immune system).
Contrary to popular belief, a 'strong' immune system isn't always an advantage.
We feel dreadful when we have a cold because of the immune system response, all of the cells and cytokines produce the fever, aches, and pains.
There is this thing called a cytokine storm, where the immune system basically freaks out when it encounters something that is so foreign to it that it really isn't sure what to do about it.
This is what is though to be the reason so many people died from the flu, and why some people continue to die and need respiratory support, they drown in their own lung secretions, due to the 'swelling' (flooding the area) part of the basic immune system response.
This is also why an elderly person can survive a blood transfusion accident, whereas a young healthy person would die quite quickly from disseminated intravascular coagulation (and cytokine storm from immune system freak out).
I personally love immunology, it has been a fairly large part of my studies at university and in my job, and it is rather complicated, and I find it frustrating that people really don't have the foggiest about it.
There is no such thing as 'building up' your immune system.
You get immunised so that your body will move through the innate to the more specific adaptive immune response where your body produces antibodies specific to the pathogen.
This typically takes about two weeks.
A lot of damage from a bacteria or virus can happen in two weeks, so once our immune system has encountered a pathogen, it creates memory cells that have the ability to create new antibodies quickly and by pass the two week delay of the innate immune system.
The antibodies (made by B cells) stick to the pathogen, cytokines are released to trigger and signal other cells, and then another macrophage (white cell with many names depending on the tissue it is in), eats the bacteria or virus.
Do you actually know some of the nasty things our immune system produces, especially the innate immune system?
Think free radicals and hydrogen peroxide and tryptase to dissolve through out own body tissues to get to where the pathogen is.
You really, really, really WANT the adaptive, antibody based immune response, and you want it as fast as possible.
So yes, you are terribly mistaken.
Terribly, terribly, terribly mistaken.
PS. Just because your sons have never had a cold or flu (which I would question), doesn't mean they are never going to catch any sort of infectious disease.
http://biomedgerontology.oxfordjournals.org/content/61/10/1051.extract
The Five Cardinal Signs of Inflammation: Calor, Dolor, Rubor, Tumor … and Penuria (Apologies to Aulus Cornelius Celsus, De medicina, c. A.D. 25)