Months ago I posted on the TnTT board that IMO the "swine flu" was being way over hyped by both the press and the government. Back then they were reporting lots of mexican deaths due to the initial known outbreak.

Well it has been in the US since about that time and the traditional flu season is just begining, BUT the CDC reports that there are normal levels of flu incidence and mortality in all catagories except infants in which it is somewhat elevated. About 99% of those in the US that have died had a pre-existing condition that was exacerbated by infection with H1N1. That is well within the limits for a normal seasonal flu in which, every year about 38,000 people die from the flu or far more commonly because they got the flu after their health was already significnatly compromised by another disease or condition.

Still, still the press is in the full hype mode on this and as a result public agencies are in the full cover your ass mode. In some school systems any kid with the sniffles is being required to go to a doctor and rule out infection with H1N1 before they can get back in school. This is overloading the local clinics and public practitioners in those areas.

And despite the hype, on AOL today there is a news story claiming that most people of all ages will NOT get the H1N1 vaccination when it becomes available. Who can blame them? The last time the Federal government hyped a flu and made a special vaccine for it a lot more people died from the vaccine than from the flu!

Now I have received vaccines for more crap than most people could imagine. I was required to for my job in the Army. How many people you know have had vaccination programs for Rabies and the Plague? I had them years ago when both first came out. However, I have become a whole lot more cautious about recommending vaccinations. It totally agree with the most common set given to kids but I also think we are over doing it these days. Over time I have become more and more convinced that vaccinations/innoculations in the young in particular can have lasting debilitating and undesirable effects to the immune system which can last for their life time. And I remain very much against this latest hype of the H1N1 and the coming vaccination for it. I can't go a day in my big truck listening to the radio when there isn't a story about H1N1 or more often the vaccine or vaccination program for it.

I find it very disturbing that our wonderful public schools, the same ones over reacting to this and so many others, have failed to make people understand that eating pork has NOTHING to do with contracting or spreading H1N1. It has become so bad that family hog farms that have been in business for generations are going under because of the fall in pork prices.

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One other thing. IF H1N1 was as dangrous/deadly/debilitating as they claimed it would have killed 10s of 1,000s in the southern hemisphere already. It has been WINTER down there and yet they seem to have suffered no worse effects than the UK has, which of all the developed countries in the northern hemisphere has reported the most severe outbreaks and effects.

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People who criticize vaccines have forgotten what life was like before them. Polio was a crippling and eventually fatal scourge that inflicted people nearly randomly at any age. Do you seriously suggest the young should not get the polio vaccine?

Smallpox killed millions every year worldwide in the early 20th century. Millions! Can you imagine such a thing. It is estimated that in the 20th Century alone Smallpox killed somewhere close to half a billion people.

Now less than a century later such death tolls are virtually unimaginable.

Have you considered that one reason such widespread genocidal epidemics don't occur is because of vaccines to include flu vaccines? The Spanish Flu in the early 20th Century killed over half a million Americans, most of them young and healthy adults. Consider that number again. Half a million Americans, the death toll worldwide was 50 to 100 million.

Vaccines, to include flu vaccines, are an incredible success story. There is no other way to spin it.

I'll be getting my flu vaccines and there is little doubt these vaccines improve immune the system. That's what they do, it's how they work.

Vaccinations are generally an innoculation into the body with a killed organism. It initiates an immune response by your body by tricking it into believing that it is being attacked by the organism. This response who's scope and breath cannot be determined by medical science. Thus there are very severe reactions to a given innoculation by some people. Some die, others end up with debilitating conditions.

While deaths and immediate reactions are easy to record tabulate and are generally rather tiny percentages of the over all number of vaccinations given; longer term debilitating effects are not so easily recognized and in fact until the last 10 years nobody was trying to keep track of them.

I did not say do not get the standard vaccinations and in fact in my post said they should be taken. What I am saying is that medical SCIENCE recognizes now that some vaccinations have caused serious problems for people in the LONG TERM. Thus it behoves people to weigh and balance the good and the possible bad from a given vaccination.

Funny how people that think they are health conscious ignore the fact that every time a health care professional gives you a shot or say even something oral like the OPV (Oral Polio Vaccine), they are putting something directly into your body they know little or nothing about.

BTW Small Pox was not that deadly as measured diseases go. The vast majority that contracted it survived. They were however disfigured by the lesions for life.

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The death figures I provided for smallpox are accurate. I regard killing freaking half a billion people in the 20th Century alone as pretty damn deadly. Yes, that was a minority of those who actually caught it. At one time a quarter to a third of the world's population was catching this disease and only a minority of them died. But half a billion people is big ass freakin number.

Vaccines prevent that. As they prevent the flu epidemics that once routinely killed millions upon millions. Now such deaths are thousands. Vaccines are an incredible success story and trying to spin it any other way is just foolish.

Concerning small pox. What I was talking about was the ratio of 'mortality' to 'morbidity' (deaths to incedince. Smallpox doesn't come close in to being as deadly as many other communicable and vector borne diseases in history.

BTW concerning the new vaccine for H1N1, those alergic to eggs should not get it.

You get your vaccine. I'm not, nor are most the people I know. I was just suggesting that you think about if you really need to or not. BTW you may not end up getting it anyway because unless you have some pre-existing condition from what I am hearing because you (and I) fall into the age bracket that it has been deemed should get the lowest priority for the vaccine. http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/vaccination/acip.htm

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