Posted on August 12, 2010 - by Nurse Virginia

BRACE YOURSELF – NOT FOR THE FLU, BUT FOR YET ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY FOR THE MEDIA CARNIVAL

Summer isn’t even over and it seems that many apparently can’t wait to scare the pants off the population with words like “pandemic.”

This comes under the heading of:

Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me!

The real flu pandemic – 1918

Yes, the so called “Spanish Flu” killed millions of people world wide. They still haven’t found where that flu originated, yet they call it “the Spanish Flu.”  It circled the globe several times from 1918 through the middle of 1920. Some say 20 million died, some say as many as 100 million. The interesting thing was, it wasn’t the very young or old who died it was the young, healthy adult.

They now blame it on an over reaction of the immune system in healthy people called, a cytokine storm. If you weren’t that robust or healthy, your body didn’t have such a strong reaction when you got the flu and it followed a normal course.  Although many deaths were the direct result of the flu, as usually is the case, it was the resulting bout of pneumonia that was actually the killer.

Again with the pandemic.

The signs are still out in front of the corner drugstore “H1N1 Shots Available” from the last pandemic forecast. And now the news is out that new vaccines coming out will protect against 3 influenza strains including the 2009 pandemic flu.

Every time I hear this kind of “news”, I have a mental picture of men in suits giving each other a high “5” – someone will be making big money. I will do the same thing I do every flu season – wash my hands, avoid people who are obviously sick and should have stayed at home and up the amount of D3 I take. (I have a reputation for never being sick, go figure)

Virginia Garberding, R.N.

Author: Please Get To Know Me – Aging with Dignity and Relevance

www.pleasegettoknowme.com