H3N2 and the useless CDC…
The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention is a poorly-named organization. They are pretty awful at both controlling and preventing disease. What they are good at it telling you what happened after the fact. Their 50/50 hindsight is legendary. In the hospitals, we often list their briefings as “PGFO” – Privileged Glimpses of the Fucking Obvious.
Case in point, Tuesday’s CDC briefing on the flu. It’s everywhere (49 out of 50 states), the vaccine most widely administered didn’t address the most prevalent H3N2 strain, and it’s aggressive earlier than in previous years. All things we knew weeks ago.
I am one of a large segment of the medical community who believes the flu vaccine is a waste of time, unless you are considered high-risk. Even then, it’s a roll of the dice as to whether the vaccine you get will actually protect you from the strain you encounter. In the US, flu vaccines are a $1.6 billion industry. ($4 billion globally.) So it’s less about protecting you as it is about protecting pharma earnings.
The hospitals I work with are all in a bed crunch, short on staff, and have overburdened emergency departments because of the flu. The EDs are especially problematic, because the majority of the people showing up there don’t need to be at the hospital. Drink fluids, stay in bed a few days, have some soup, and take warm showers is the prescription for 99% of flu sufferers. The antivirals only work when you take them very early in the disease cycle, and most people don’t feel sick enough to bother. By the time they do, it’s too late.
Be prepared to hear a lot about this in the news in the coming weeks. This flu will be with us through March.
I can’t STAND people who go to the ER for cold or flu. Unless I can’t breath (which has happened due to asthma) my butt stays at home where it belongs or I make an appointment with my GP.
@catmommy The worst part is, they end up infecting others who are there for legitimate reasons. Part of the reason we’re having this epidemic.
@bedlamhillfarm Exactly. The ER is just a giant germ factory, it would be less so if people had common sense and stayed home. My mum used to drag me to the ER when I was a kid for every little sniffle and I swore once I had autonomy I was not going to the ER except for actual emergencies. Once I was 13 I was taller and she couldn’t force me to go anymore. This is a woman who ended up in the ER because she turned her skin blue with dye from new sheets and thought she was dying.
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I hate to see the CDC put down. My niece is a biologist there and I know how hard she works. She has been overseas with the Ebola team several times trying to keep it from spreading to other areas. She has also been to Africa with the AIDS team. She is the biologist that isolated the SARS virus a few years back. From what I understand, this years vaccine is 70% effective against 2 of the strains and only 10% effective against the third strain. We are really asking them to play a guessing game. Guess which strain will win out and be the major problem this year? I also understand that if you get the vaccination each year you actually develop a broader immunity from the different strains you’ve been vaccinated with. I’m not a medical person, so I’m just passing on what I’ve heard and some knowledge on the CDC.
@dlk082244 A lot of errors in your statements. The CDC has nothing to do with the selection of the vaccine. Each year’s flu vaccine contains three (trivalent) or four (quadrivalent) strains of the flu. It’s a crap shoot. Selected in February by the World Health Organization and then endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration, the strains are manufactured by the pharma giants. Recent research evidence suggests that getting a flu shot every year might reduce its effectiveness in warding off the flu, not improve it. Overall effectiveness of the flu vaccine is 23% overall, pretty dismal. The death rate from the flu is about the same for the vaccinated vs. the un-vaccinated.
I know lots of thoroughly lovely, hard-working people at the CDC, but it doesn’t change the opinion of the organization held by those of us who are providing care in hospitals and clinics on a daily basis. Your examples of SARS and Ebola are classic examples of the fear-mongering the CDC engages in on a daily basis.
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