It's still summer in the northern hemisphere but the flu season is not far away, and you need to be ready for it.
Why is there so much hype about flu? It’s just like a really bad cold, right? Well, no, not exactly. There are several reasons why you should be concerned about flu.
The most obvious reason is that it could make you very sick. If you see someone walking around at your school or place of work, snuffling and holding a handkerchief to their nose, and saying they have a bad case of flu, they probably have a cold and are not dealing with it very well. Influenza will, in most cases, have you in bed with a fever and feeling lousy. And that is where you should stay.
Contagion
Once you have been exposed to the virus you are infectious for between one and four days before you start to feel ill. You will be infectious for around six days. You can be exposed to the virus by taking in droplets from a cough or sneeze, or by touching something that has been exposed to the virus and then touching your mouth or nose. The virus then attacks your respiratory system and can lead to infection or pneumonia.
Even if you are young and healthy you are susceptible to secondary infections, and you can infect others who may not be so strong.
Vaccination
The vaccines for the 2016 flu season have already been configured, as a blend of three types of virus which are identical to those in the 2015 vaccine. It’s important that you get a vaccine every year, especially if you are in the category of people thought to be vulnerable. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is recommending that everyone over the age of 6 months gets a flu vaccine.
The vaccines are being shipped as of August 18th 2015, and will soon be at a flu clinic near you. You can find your closest flu clinic by using the Flu Vaccine Finder, contacting your doctor, or in the local newspaper. If you cannot be infected you cannot transmit the virus to others and if everyone gets a vaccination the virus will have nowhere to go at all.
The Virus
There are many different types of flu virus, some recurring year after year, others developing as a mutation or crossing the species barrier. The names bird flu, swine flu and human flu are applied to virus types which are usually far more complex than the name implies.
Bird, or avian influenza is properly known as H5N1, based on the surface protein structure of the virus. When this virus was transmitted to people in Hong Kong, in 1997, it was found that death occurred in one third of the people infected. Also called HK97, the virus surfaced again in 2005 and humanity has been saved from a major pandemic by the fact that the virus does not transmit from one person to another.
The 2005 virus was deadly in one half of the infected people. Swine flu, H1N1, does go from person to person and is closely related to the 1918 Spanish flu virus. In the winter of 1918 an estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza. Globally the mortality is suspected to be between 30 and 40 million.
Vaccination programs aim to prevent this ever happening again.
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