Myth busted: Influenza does not cause nausea!

So, my daughter has been vomiting any food intake the past couple days. One evening I said -- jokingly -- to my wife, "She's probably got that swine flu thing. You know: H1N1."

My wife, wise as wives are, corrected my fallacious statement. She said: "I think that most people get influenza and gastroenteritis mixed up. Influenza is an infection of the lungs, and the stomach flu is what causes nausea and vomiting.

"In fact," she continued, "I think most people who get the flu shot and complain that they got the flu anyway definitely don't know the difference. Because the flu shot you get every year does not prevent the stomach flu (gastroenteritis), it prevents you from getting influenza."

According to HealthCentral.com:

"Influenza, usually known as the flu, is a respiratory infection caused by the influenza virus. The infection typically is spread by air or by direct contact, from one person to another. Most cases occur during epidemics, which peak during the winter months nearly every year. Influenza virus is very contagious. A particularly widespread and severe epidemic is called a pandemic...

"With many other types of infections - for example, mumps - having the disease once protects against a second infection because the body's immune system 'remembers' the returning virus, attacks it immediately and rapidly eliminates it. With influenza, the virus usually has mutated (changed) somewhat since the first infection, but the change is enough to fool our immune system. Instead of attacking the virus rapidly, as it would a virus that it had seen before, the immune system responds slowly. By the time the immune response is in full gear, millions of the body's cells already have been infected with the virus."

It is because the flu virus mutates that you need to get a flu vaccination each year, rather than just once. Each year the vaccination is adjusted to prevent against the current "mutated" strain.

Symptoms of influenza are as follows:

• Chills
• Moderate to high fever (101° to 103° Fahrenheit)
• Sore throat
• Runny nose
• Muscle aches
• Headaches
• Fatigue
• Cough
• Diarrhea
• Dizziness

As I was perusing the web looking for some information on the stomach flu, I came across a neat article at HealthCentral.com called, "Five Myths about the flu," by David Stanley. He writes that when someone says "I have the flu," and is face to face with him, he knows with relative certainty the person does not have the flu.

He gives the person what he calls the Fast Test, which consists of the following questions:

• Fever - The flu typically produces a high fever that lasts three to four days. Fever with a cold is rare.
• Aches and pains - Headache is a trademark of the flu. Other general aches and pains are common as well.
• Sudden onset - A person can go from feeling perfectly healthy to a full-blown case of the flu in a matter of hours. Cold symptoms tend to develop over days.
• Tiredness- If you have the flu and make it to the store to ask me about it, you are one tough cookie. Most people with a cold can carry on, but if you have the flu, do what your body is telling you to do and stay in bed.

So, basically, if you have the real flu you are not going to be out and about telling people you have the flu. Oh, and speaking of "real flu", Stanley writes that influenza rarely causes stomach irritation, and therefore there really is no such thing as the "stomach flu." Thus, if you are nauseous, what you actually have is gastroenteritis, which is an infection of the intestine caused by a different type of virus.

As per all the people I work with complaining that they won't get the annual flu shot because it caused them to get the flu, Stanley clears up this myth:

"This simply cannot happen. The flu shot uses a dead form of the virus to trigger an immune response, and that dead virus cannot come back to life and infect you. If you think your flu shot gave you the flu, first apply the FAST test to see if you have it or just caught a cold. If you do indeed have the flu, one of two things happened: You became infected during the one to two weeks it takes for the flu shot to begin to provide protection.You became infected with a version of the virus not covered by this year's vaccine.

The author, David Stanley, writes: "This may sound odd, but if you say this to me face-to-face at the store, you probably don't have the flu. While people can easily confuse a bad cold with the flu, I use what I call the FAST test to tell the difference. There are four questions to ask to distinguish the flu from a cold:

So, since my daughter is walking around all day with no fever, and playing with her toys, it's highly unlikely that she has the flu. Likewise, if you are having bouts of nausea and vomiting, you don't have the flu either.

And once again the wife was right.

Swine flu: we must remember 1918, yet not repeat the fiasco of 1976

As you probably well know by now, the White House has declared a state of emergency as 140 plus people have died of the swine flu in Mexico, the disease has been reported now in four countries, and in several states within the United States.

So far, of the 50 plus Americans to get the swine flu in the U.S., all cases have been generally mild and are not expected to be life threatening. Which begs one to wonder if the deaths in Mexico are due to lack of good medical care, or a more virulent strain in Mexico. This lack of knowing is certainly troubling to scientists and politicians, hence the seriousness of the matter.

Officials are wise to add that there needs NOT be a state of panic because of this outbreak, just a state of vigilance because officials are not quite positive how rapidly this virus spreads. The basic reason for the state of emergency is to "allow the federal and state governments easier access to flu tests and medications," according to HealthCentral.com.

I think it was Obama who wrote a memo regarding the seriousness of preparing for a possible flu outbreak when he was a young Senator, and George Bush set aside in his budget monies to prepare for such an outbreak, and to work on finding a cure if such a "mutated" virus were to cause havoc. Currently, drug makers are in a mad dash to create a vaccine.

So I think the Obama administration is making all the right moves at the present time to create awareness, and yet not cause a panic. Which, by the way, reminds me of what happened during the 1976 swine flu scare. One soldier at Fort Dix caught the flu and died, and an estimated 500 other soldiers had the flu while having only mild symptoms.

Yet, with a flu virus spreading so fast, the population -- including those in Washington -- were worried because any virus that spreads that fast could, possibly, cause a pandemic. So, does the government take the wait and see approach, or work to create a vaccine and make everyone take it?

There was a lot of political pressure on Gerald R. Ford. Plus there was the memory of the Great Flu. According to capitalcentury.com, (an article by Paul Mickle) "The Great Plague... rivaled the horrid Black Death of medieval times in its ability to strike suddenly and take lives swiftly. In addition to the half million in America, it killed 20 million people around the world."

The irony of that last quote was the Great Flu more than rivaled the Great plague. The Great flu spread across a nation and killed 20 million people within a short time, and the black plague killed that many people in over a decade of work. The Great Flu, by all means, was an even greater threat as the plague.

And considering the Great flu spread so fast at a time when few people traveled great distances by plane, bus or train, or from one continent to another within a few short hours, it would seem the fear of a disease spreading in 1976 -- or today -- would spread faster and be twice as deadly.

The swine flu comes from poultry and swine, and people who have intense exposure are at most risk of getting it, as the strain can also effect humans. Unfortunately, the strain has the ability to genetically change (mutate), and thus become more resilient and difficult to inoculate against. As what happened in 1976, the current strain of swine flu seems to have mutated.

So Ford, in 1976, amid a highly politicized season where Reagan had just recently beaten Ford in the North Carolina primary, did not want to be seen as doing nothing, especially if a pandemic did spread. And so, he and Washington hastily made a flu vaccine available for mass inoculations, and a $135 million flu inoculation program was swiftly available. It was announced to the public on March 24, a day after the North Carolina primary.

My point is simple: politics had a hand in what happened next, and Obama does not want to make the same mistake. So, while there were the "naysayers" who warned Ford that the swine flu epidemic was limited to one military base, and only one person had died, the plan for inoculating the public was rushed through Congress. The goal was to get all 220 million Americans inoculated.

By October 1 the vaccine was ready and sent to many doctors, health departments and schools across the nation. Jim Florio, a top democratic Senator who supported Jimmy Carter, was the first to take the vaccine. He did this instead of taking a swipe at Ford for his hasty actions. He too was scared of the swine flu.

Soon thereafter two people who had been given the vaccine died of heart attacks. By Dec. 16 40 million poeple (20% of the population) had received the shot, many of whom later reported symptoms of a rare disease called Guillen Barre. Because of the "Epidemic that never was" people were now becoming paralyzed. In total, over 500 people became paralyzed because of the "Epidemic that never was."

Mickle states it best when he writes: "The swine flu case of 1976 forever reduced confidence in public health pronouncements from the government and helped foster cynicism about federal policy makers that continues to this day.Citing the swine flu fiasco, for instance, one scholar recently authored a report suggesting the threat of AIDS has been similarly overblown."

Said another way, because of the "Epidemic that never was" people lost confidence in the government (big surprise there). I can think of several other times where the government has failed the people, and these failures are spread across many presidencys, both republican and democrat.

The fear that "something has to be done" often superseded rational thought. On the other hand, fear that something will be done and it will be the wrong thing -- as was the case with Katrina -- makes governments fear they must do something -- however hastily.

Fear of the inoculations lead people to not want to get the vaccination, and the program was halted by Dec. 16. In total, over 500 people became paralyzed as a result of the vaccine, and 25 of them died. It is also true that only one person died of the actual flu.

So, fear -- especially fear in politics -- is a double edged sword. If you rush to create a vaccine and it works, you are a hero. If you rush and it doesn't work, you are a failure. If you don't do anything and nothing happens, you are fine. But if you do nothing and a pandemic hits, you are again a failure. So, it could turn out that no matter what Obama does, he may merely be a passenger on a roulette table.

So, with all due respect, our politicians must not rush to make judgements, yet they must -- as Obama has done -- educate and prepare, yet not scare, the public. How to do this in the most effective means has yet to be determined, and may prove impossible.

One other thing must be understood about the flu. The current outbreak is said to have effected (at this point) a few thousand individuals, 100 of whom have died in Mexico. One expert, however, was quick to point out that the total number of flu victims is widely inaccurate.

He said that when a flu virus mutates, the death total is usually 1-2% of the total number of cases of the flu. He said, if his calculations are correct, the actual number of people right now with the swine flu is more likely to be in the range of 10,000 to 100,000.

Yet, as government officials have said, we must not panic, yet we must also be prepared.

For the latest updates on swine flu and flu symptoms, click here.

New treatments may prevent future flu pandemic

I had a neat discussion last weekend with a 99-year-old man about things he experienced in his life. One of the things he decided to share with me was that he was a little boy during the flu epidemic of 1918, and he remembers the scare quite well.

He said that he even had the flu, "But I didn't die, obviously."

If a new report is true, it may not have been the flu that killed all those people back then after all, but a bacteria. This might shed new hope that another flu epidemic might be preventable with modern medicines.

According to NPR.org:

What killed tens of millions of people around the world in the 1918 flu pandemic actually might not have been a flu virus. A new study in the Journal of Infectious Diseases blames different agents: bacteria.

The flu virus weakened lungs, opening the door to fatal bacterial pneumonia in most of the pandemic's 50 million victims, according to researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The researchers based their findings on preserved lung tissue from 58 soldiers who were infected by the flu and died in 1918 and 1919. They found tissue changes that are the hallmarks of bacteria, not viruses, as well as the destruction of cells that
normally protect lungs from bacteria.

They also studied case reports from 1918 in which doctors said they suspected a second infection. One doctor said that the flu "condemns," but secondary infections "execute."

The new research suggests that with the availability of effective treatments for bacterial infections, a modern-day flu pandemic might not be so deadly

The emphasis in that last paragraph was added by me.

I think it's neat that scientists can do such research on tissues from so long ago, let alone the fact that scientists had the foresight way back then to take tissue samples for future research. It's also amazing that we can even do this research today.