No, we do not have the flu, thankfully. I thought I would pop on here while my pictures are uploading (for the birthday post) and link you to some interesting information that I have found on this piggy flu. Trust me, this isn't the kind of info that you will find on the mainstream news.
I do not know the copywrite jargon on the information so I will just give you the links for you to read on the original sites that I found the articles on.
This first one is from a pediatrician. She has some good info. I don't personally endorse getting vaccinations though, but the other info is still good to have. I tried to post just a link, but they didn't have one, except just to the site itself, and then you would have searched. So I did copy and paste the following letter. I got it from this site: http://www.drjen4kids.com/ I originally found this article and some great flu discussion of the Raising Godly Tomatoes site (RGT).
Author: dr jenDate: 4/27/2009 10:41 am CDT
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Hey everyone, and my apologies to those of you who have garnered this info from my Facebook page, I feel as if I need to give you some info on swine flu. Some of you know that I am in the midst of a Master's in Public Health, so this outbreak is fast becoming an area that I am better prepared for. So, first public health info... Each country is charged with keeping "surveillance" data on certain diseases. Surveillance means that we keep track of baseline cases occurring, and then set an "epidemic threshold" that when met, causes us to pay attention. Epidemic just means more cases than usual or expected. Influenza reaches epidemic status every year. Also part of that surveillance is the occassional sample of the strain that caused the disease. For influenza, they monitor the strain to make sure that the strain they predicted would occur this season was the one they made the vaccine for. So, during this routine surveillance, they picked up this new strain. That means that all these people in Mexico tested positive for Influenza A, probably awhile before their strain was determined to be swine flu. (In the office, that's all I ever know. I can test for Influenza A or B. Not Influenza strain H1N1.) In retrospect, many of these people may have had this new strain and their doc only knew it was Influenza A. So what does this mean? Well, as they find out the type the strain of more and more of these positive cases, more and more cases of swine flu will show up. That's the only thing that can happen. They weren't looking for it before. When you look for it, cases go up. Most of the cases have been in healthy people. If they spread it to less healthy friends and family, you will be hearing about it becoming a more dangerous strain. I'm not sure that's going to be true. It is probably dangerous- it is just the host's immune system and underlying health that will make the difference as to how dangerous. And I'm loving the phrase "mutant strain." That's the very essence of influenza. It "mutates" every year (we call it "antigenic drift"), and that's why we need a flu shot every year. This one is special since it originated from pigs, and usually only the one handling the pig gets infected, but this flu morphed so that it can now be passed person to person. Like a million other diseases. The next thing is that there isn't a single recommendation that the medical pundits are recommending that we wouldn't recommend already: wash your hands, cover your cough, stay home if you are sick. Basics, really. The anti-viral medications aren't all that helpful in pediatric cases. We don't usually write prescriptions for them, even during flu season. The flu shot isn't protective for this strain. It was for the human influenza that we just had a zillion cases of. To put this into perspective: influenza kills Americans every year. It's contagious, can be fatal and is one big reason why I hope you all get flu shots. I have been thinking that they ought to be reporting how many people have been diagnosed with coronary artery disease, have been suspected of having heart disease and who have died of a heart attack right next to these case outbreak numbers. Side by side tickers. The heart disease will win. So, what am I saying? It looks as if the US pandemic flu system is up and running. It's a good test of our capabilities. It's flu. Wash you hands, cover your cough and stay away from sick people. Get some sun. If it ever comes out again. Vitamin D has been shown to prevent flu. And of course, we are theoretically heading into summer, so that should increase out chances of getting sunshine and slowing down the spread of the illness. If the media coverage is worrisome, stop watching. We're here if you need us and happy to test those with symptoms. I'm not sure we'll be treating a lot of people with anything but reassurance. As always, we're happy to see really sick kids. Even if it's not swine flu. Take a deep breath, Dr. Jen, on her birthday
In the flu thread on the RGT site someone sent us to the Well Tell Me message board. They had some great info there as well. Some that are interesting:
http://www.welltellme.com/discuss/index.php?PHPSESSID=cnr8lfttqks60bautp3f7f2b53&topic=23892.msg228699#msg228699
If you have the time read it all, if not read response numbers: 1, 12, and 25
That is just a taste of some of the information to be found to keep yourselves healthy. I'll post more information when I come across it. In the above link to the message board I found something very interesting. One person made the following comment (just a paraphrase on my part), "Besides cancer my family hasn't been sick in years". I found this interesting because of something I read in Dr. Joel Fuhrman's book "Disease Proof Your Child". He found that quite a few cancer patients had something in common. They would tell him that their cancer was a shock because they had not been sick in years. This is what the one person on the board said. Dr. Fuhrman said that the reason these cancer patients were not sick was because their immune systems were not working. All of us have cancer, it's just to what degree. Our bodies are able to deal with these renegade cells as long as we haven't destroyed our bodies' innate ability to fight them off. Without a working immune system these cancer cells are allowed to run amuck, finally causing symptoms and problems. We think that when we have a runny nose that it is the virus itself, the actual sickness/germ. However the runny nose is our immune systems response to the germ. We try to get rid of the runny nose, thinking we are getting rid of the germs, but we are just undermining our bodies defense system, not killing any bugs in the process. Anyways, I thought that was interesting, the comment, and what I have read in the past. So maybe, since my family always seems to get one thing or another, maybe that actually means we are really, really healthy??? Maybe???? One could hope :-)
Ok, I must get going, and get back to work :-) I will have some birthday pictures to share later.
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