The great US of A has been on a stay-scared bent for at least a decade. The health industry tried as hard as they could to get us wound up about avian flu a few years ago, but it died before it was born.

They had better luck with swine flu when it killed about 60 people in mexico (or maybe not. No one seems to what was behind that other than the fact that about 60 people died, and they also had swine flu.) Since then, swine flue seems to be involved in the deaths of about 1 person in a million. Keep in mind that these people invariable have “complicating factors”. In other words, it could well have been something else that “killed” them, but swine flu gets the blame.

Cutting to the chase, unless you have enough wrong with you that just about anything from a hang-nail or worse will kill you, swine flu is no more problematic than regular flu. It just has a better PR campaign.

The human immune systems reacts to the antigenic (protein capsule) of the vaccine or if you are unlucky the actual flu. You body goes into overdrive to produce unique antibodies that will lock up the virus. White cells in your blood will also act to knock out foreign matter in your blood stream. Think of a puzzle piece that fits in a certain location is how an antibody works. Your immune response will also trigger the fever reaction as heat kills antigenic invaders as well.

Viruses unlike a bacterial will invade a cell and use the cells metabolic machinery to produce millions more duplicate virus capsules until the cell expells the newly prduced virus. When you are sick with the flu your body is reacting with all the immune machinery it can muster to kill the invaders. Think Space Invaders and the zapper procedure here.

Viruses will attenuate over time as they move thru the population. Most of the time they get less virulent but occasionally they can mutate into a more virulent form.

The folks making the vaccines are playing a guessing game as to which set of viruses will be doing to most damage in a given year. The very old and very young are the most at risk due to the condition of their respective immune systems. That is why the older you get the fewer colds you tend to have up to a point where you become old and frail. Your immune systems has more than likely seen the typical cold virus and has the memory and antibodies ready to go for most all of the cold viruses in circulation.

Bacterial infections are susceptable to antibiotics. Virus infestions are not and you are wasting your money trying to kill off a virus with antiboitics. Not to mention creating stronger bacteria in the process. There is no such thing as a 100% kill with antibiotics. The survivors become resistant to antiboitics over time.

This may be an oversimplification but it will suffice for discussion purposes.

You were there Guardian…sounds like it wasn’t quite the case that “most people who waited in line got their vaccine” ?

EDITOR NOTE–I left prior to running out, but it was reported all 1,200 doses were used by about 1:30 p.m. at the Park Center location.