1/18/2013
…and…I hope you got your flu shot.
I admitted a lot of really sick people of all ages this week with confirmed influenza – fever, cough, muscle aches. Of course we don’t put most people with the flu in the hospital, just the ones who can’t breathe. One of my patients is on a ventilator, and we’ve had several deaths in our county from flu already, including young people. The latest was a 17 year old previously healthy girl. That should concern you. You see, we typically think of flu as being most vicious in the very young and very old, however some strains of flu are actually worse in the young and healthy because they trigger the body’s immune system to fight even harder, and it’s the immune system itself that can overwhelm the patient and cause death. We don’t have too much in the way of treatment for that. The best we can do is prevention. So, get your flu shot, no matter your age. This year and every year.
Influenza virus is a tricky devil. It changes shape and gets stronger when it develops in other animals like mice, or pigs, or birds, and then it works its way to the human population where it becomes much more lethal for the first few years because we’ve never encountered the new version before. This is what caused the Spanish Flu Epidemic that killed roughly 20 million people in the early 1900’s. You might think that’s because we didn’t have good medicines then, but you’d be wrong. It’s because the virus was just that ugly- killing 1 out of every 4 people exposed to it especially young, healthy people. We still don’t have good medicines to treat new varieties of influenza like bird flu.
The potential for epidemics with previously unknown flu viruses is not only real, but unpredictable. That’s what motivated me to create a story around it in my novel, VIRION. You can click on the link on the homepage of this website, or go to Barnesandnoble.com or Amazon.com if you’d like to order it. Paperback and e-book formats available—and I’ll come to your book club for the discussion questions at the end if you like!