MentalPolyphonics
You ain't gotta be in jail to be doin' time.
September 23, 2009 at 1:31 pm
I’ve been hearing enough about H1N1 to be worried. What’s the big idea? Are we all supposed to get shots for this beast? Is this an extinction level event, or does the CBC just have a lot of dead air needs fillin’?
Of course they’re saying this is the wurst thing evar omg we’re all gonna die from zombies, and I generally ignore people who talk like that, but I’m not seeing a lot of rational discussion. Where are the old lettered dudes in lab coats with patched elbows and calming, fatherly voices? How likely is the disease to kill? How likely to contract?
What are the downsides of rushing out a vaccine? I guess they’re injecting all the at-risk populations first, so they’re our canaries. Still, I favor accurate medicine over fast medicine.
Anyway, things like this are what we have Cold FX for, no? Just kidding — the best antidote to panic is information, so I’m off to Wikipedia for health information — e-gad, never thought I’d say that!
[PS: Oh, I get it: It's like Y2K -- The experts are panicking because if it's bad it'll be really bad, but probably nothing will happen and they'll be mocked for years afterward. Hoffmann-La Roche is also going to make an obscene amount of money for shareholders. Too bad they're privately-held.]
[PPS: Hoffmann-La Roche is privately-held... by Roche Holding Ltd., a Swiss health company with trading ADRs. GlaxoSmithKline -- The Brits -- also make a flu drug and have ADRs trading on the NYSE. Or you could just buy them in their native markets if you have that kind of setup.]
[PPPS: Roche licenses Tamiflu from Gilead Sciences, Inc.*, but their royalty arrangement might not be big enough to seriously uptick Gilead unless things get really bad. Novavax, Inc. is another vaccine play -- they don't make the stuff, just sell the biotech to make making the stuff easier. When there's a gold rush, sell shovels.
* Poe: "Is there -- is there balm in Gilead? -- tell me -- tell me, I implore!" / Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."]
Karen
My understanding from the swine flu, is that they are worried because it came from animals to humans, like other plagues. yet the swine flu is not killing as many as they predicted. the common flu is still killing way more people than the swine flu.
The flu vaccine this year will contain swine flu and won’t be out until november. They are giving priority to pregnant woman, infants, people with compromised immunes systems and people who work with these people. I usually get the flu shot every year but this one worries me a bit because I have heard they have grown the vaccine differently and have no real idea what the reaction will be. So I think I will wait a bit this year before I get a shot and see what if any bad reactions happen. I would be interested in knowing more about how they are coming up with the vaccine.
Jared
Vaccination is a collective action problem: discuss.
There’s a study, which I’m too lazy to find right now, that modeled H1N1 and decided that we should just vaccinate all the school children and leave the adults unvaccianted.
Karen
School wide vaccinations of the unknown really worry me. There will be not enough time to do a controlled study before we inflict this vaccination on millions of children. I feel better about the vaccinations that have been around and better tested.
It is a collective action problem because vaccinations only work if the majority of the people get them done. If the numbers drop below a certian majority than the diseases can come back and inflitrate the whole population. Measles and polio outbreaks occur because too many parents began to not vaccinate their children. I once talked to a nurse who was very upset about polio begin back in the population in canada because they had eradicated it for many years and it shouldn’t be back.
Jack
Collective action problems can (should?) be solved by government, but forced injections seem a little beyond the pale.
The last time H1N1 attacked the humans was just after WWI and 50% of the worldwide population caught it. Most of the fatalities from that outbreak came from pneumonia, but now we know about antibiotics so that’s not too worrisome.
Similarly during one of the last major outbreaks there was a “light” Spring/Summer infection cycle followed by a really deadly onslaught in Fall/Winter. We’ve just been through the former and are heading into the latter. I wonder to what extent the pattern will repeat. I don’t think we’ll ever have a sample size to model these things effectively ahead of time, they’re all black swans.
New vaccines are dangerous. That one researcher who just died from the plague was working with a supposedly-deactivated strain. I guess I should read more about how they’re developing this vaccine. Simple math though: Even if it only adversely effects one in a thousand people that’s still millions worldwide, starting with children, natives*, pregnant women, and the elderly. I would actually expect the first wave of vaccinations to be relatively lethal.
I think a large part of my dissonance is coming from the jornos being all, “ur all gonna die, lulz” and actual doctors saying, “just wash your hands and you’ll be fine.” That’s a big gap.
* I have no idea why the natives let us test vaccines on them. If I was them I wouldn’t trust us, certainly not in the first wave of injections. I barely trust us now and my people have never been victims of germ warfare flavored genocide. Would every Jew in the world willingly take a shot of an untested drug from a German pharmaceutical concern? No? Then why would every Kwakiutl?
Jack
Earlier this year I had a truly-awful bout of the flu, bad enough to have neurological effects like synaesthesia. I wonder if I had this then — it happened just before H1N1 hit the news, maybe before they started diagnosing it separately, just after my Father got back from Ecuador. Maybe I’m immune now.
Anyway, I found one thing and one thing only that truly gave respite from the symptoms: Marijuana. Imagine you’ve been as sick as you can remember for five days: constant pain, fever, nausea. You’re so desperate for relief you’ll try anything. You’ve heard about medical marijuana so you smoke a joint and then for an hour you feel completely normal again, even hungry and happy.
It was like a gift from the bleeding hands of Jesus Hisself.
Karen
I keep hoping that I had it already too. I got really sick in February and it must have been something that wasn’t part of my flu shot. But I think I am just tricking myself.
Karen
Oh great! Now there is a study telling me that people who get flu vaccines may be more likely to get swine flu. But really that could be more variables in play. Bad study.
Jack
Manson has H1N1. Lulz.
Don
Aren’t flu vaccines “rushed out” every year, because of the quickly-changing nature of RNA viruses?
Is the H1N1 flu vaccine really being grown differently? I had been planning on getting seasonal and H1N1 flu shots this fall. I usually get a flu shot every year.
Jack
Sanjay Gupta and (possibly) Anderson Cooper have it too. This seems to be a virus that targets media personalities.
@Don: IANAB, so no idea. As I understand it the samples take a while to process and then, yes, they rush to get a vaccine out for whatever strain is most virulent every year. The Swine is a mutant flu though, so perhaps it’s monkey-wrenched the assembly line? But really I’m just parroting the random info trickling down to me through the telescreen: “Flu shot rations are up this year!”, etc.
I’ve also read that we have a semi-fixed* production capacity for flu shots of about a billion doses. If we switch that capacity over to H1N1 we will, of necessity, produce fewer H5N3 shots (or whatever this year’s “normal” strain is, I vaguely recall numbers like that from my pre-jog, pre-coffee, warm bed alarm news haze). There’s some optimal distro, some balancing point, that we’d have to find. Imagine if H1N1 took a binary shot like they said it might early on — we’d burn two regular doses for one swine dose, so our total viral coverage would plummet.
I heard somewhere (prolly CBC) that people who get regular flu shots might, somehow, be more susceptible to H1N1 — but who knows? If this a media virus the first symptom seems to be an inability to report consistent information. All-in I’d feel comfortable wagering that H1N1 memes will cause more stress than H1N1 genes this time out, as long as I got reasonable odds.
Just now the CDC, via the CBC, said they’d be releasing educational materials once the vaccine is ready to go. I think it was them. Some talking head, anyway.
* Squishy business speak for “we’d need to invest more”.