Get a flu shot. Wash your hands.

[AuntPeggy]

http://todayhealth.today.com/_news/...eclares-flu-emergency-700-cases-reported?lite

Boston has seen about 700 confirmed cases of influenza since the season began in October. That compares to about 70 cases for all of last year, said Nick Martin, a spokesman for the Boston Public Health Commission. While last year was an unusually mild flu season, according to government health officials, those numbers are worrisome.

"This is the worst flu season we've seen since 2009, and people should take the threat of flu seriously," Menino said in a news release. "This is not only a health concern, but also an economic concern for families, and I'm urging residents to get vaccinated if they haven't already. It's the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your family. If you're sick, please stay home from work or school."

 

[Jim Logajan]

This is why I don't get flu shots. I prefer to make my immune system do something now and then, anyway. Keep its proficiency up.

Are you saying that flu shots don't trigger the same reaction from the immune system as live viruses?

Not scared of needles - I just know enough about vaccines to know what I want and what I don't, plus why. Note: I don't tell others not to, just say that I have my reasons why I don't. If you can't respect that, then I'll resume badgering your fake, overpriced airplanes.

Your first post suggests you either don't understand vaccines - or you don't agree with commonly accepted biological mechanism at play.

I look at it as the "luddite" stage.

I have my philosophical as well as statistical/engineering reasons. Like I said, I do not presume to tell anyone else what to do, I just know what I choose to do and why.

I would like to know specifically what your reasons are for not getting a flu shot. You seem to be claiming to have defensible rational reasons, so I think you should state them. This seems as good a thread as any to do that.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Just curious, how many more chromosomes does the flu virus have than the polio virus?

Is it just that the flu continues to vary quickly that we cannot get enough vaccine out to killed it completely?

According to this site, the 1981 poliovirus was sequenced and was found to have 7411 nucleotides (that seems awfully short.) I do not know how many gene coding sequences that it contains, though they do actually show the entire sequence on that web page:

http://amhistory.si.edu/polio/virusvaccine/pgenome.htm

On the other hand it looks like the nucleotide sequences in pneumonia strains number in the millions ("... the 6 million nucleotides that make up the K. pneumoniae genome" from http://www.genome.gov/27549852)

So if I found reasonably correct numbers, it looks like pneumonia has on the order of a thousand times more genes that can permute, making it that much more variable.

 

[Jim Logajan]

Yes. Flu is constantly mutating, unlike polio or smallpox. Flu is constantly varying and passing gene sequences among themselves (called genetic drift), so the "match" between the vaccine and the virus degrades over time.

Also, the lead time to make vaccines requires that CDC/WHO choose which strains will be the dominant strains and to incorporate into the vaccine months before the vaccine is actually available.
Most times they get it right, sometimes they miss (which is why the vaccine this year gets two of the three strains, the third one popped up after the vaccine was in production).

With static viruses (polio, smallpox, etc), vaccination can nearly eliminate them. Viruses that mutate (flu, cold, HIV, etc) can't.

First, I need to correct a mistake I made in the post you responded to: I went looking for pneumonia, which was a mistake since that describes an inflammatory condition caused by either a virus or a bacteria. The 6 million nucleotide number I found is for a bacteria, not a virus.

On looking up influenza, Wikipedia's page seems to give a reasonable summary here of H1N1, H1N2, etc.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthomyxoviridae

According to that page, the nucleotide sequence length of influenza viri is on the order of 12,000 to 15,000 nt (nucleotides).

(Their web page on poliovirus confirms the ~7500 nt for that virus.)

That makes the average flu virus at most two times longer than polio. That doesn't change the basic idea that the longer virus may mutate faster. The Wikipedia pages for the two classes use different units of measurement for mutation rate, and I'm a layman on this subject and not sure the proper way to convert them to the same set of units.

For polio they say: "The mutation rate in the virus is relatively high even for an RNA virus with a synonymous substitution rate of 1.0 x 10[sup]−2[/sup] substitutions/site/year and non synonymous substitution rate of 3.0 x 10[sup]−4[/sup] substitutions/site/year."

While for influenza they say: "Since RNA proofreading enzymes are absent, the RNA-dependent RNA transcriptase makes a single nucleotide insertion error roughly every 10 thousand nucleotides, which is the approximate length of the influenza vRNA. Hence, nearly every newly-manufactured influenza virus will contain a mutation in its genome."