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Thursday, December 25, 2008

Something about FLU...for your knowledge...

The Spanish Flu is the most well-known pandemic of the flu

It took out anywhere from 40 to 100 million people from 1918 to 1920. It was so severe that it registered a Level 5 on the Pandemic Severity Scale, which is the highest level that exists. The mortality rate was incredibly high – some estimates say up to 20 percent. People that got it and survived, though, include FDR, Walt Disney, Mary Pickford, General Pershing and Woodrow Wilson.


You can treat the flu.


Within 48 hours of contracting it, a doctor can prescribe antiviral medicine that will help. It’s not going to get rid of it entirely, but it will lessen the time that you’re curled up on the couch, watching bad daytime T.V. and wanting to die.


In the U.S. alone, the flu season results in 36,000-ish deaths



And 200,000 hospitalizations. As if those facts weren’t painful enough, the flu costs Americans a collective $10 billion annuall


People who say they have the “stomach flu” probably don’t really have the flu



It’s just a nickname that came about because you feel crappy in similar ways to the real flu. But, WebMD says, if you don’t have fever or body ache, you likely don’t have the flu – just a gastrointestinal virus of some sort. __________________



The flu vaccine can’t give you the flu


The vaccines only contain a dead piece of the flu virus, and a dead virus can’t infect you. There is a nasal vaccine that contains a live virus, but that particular vaccine is designed to seek and destroy the part of the virus that actually makes you sick.



This one is Snopes-verified – Donald Rumsfeld owns stock in Gilead Sciences, the company that makes Tamiflu


Tamiflu, for those that don’t know , is a drug that can reduce the severity of the flu. Some people think this is a big conspiracy theory – that the avian flu and other strains have become a huge deal in recent years because the government, including Rumsfeld, wanted to make a tidy profit from his stocks.


The flu has been around for a loooong time


Hippocrates wrote of an illness with a description closely matching today’s modern flu symptoms


The most recent flu pandemic was the Hong Kong Flu


In 1968-69, which registered as a Level 2 on the Pandemic Severity Index. About 500,000 people were infected in Hong Kong, about 50 million were infect in the U.S. Around 34,000 of those 50 million died.


Recently (September), Sir Mark Sykes of England was dug up


Scientists could study the Spanish Flu virus, hoping to understand more about the current bird flu. Even though Sykes has been six feet under for the past 90 years, the fact that he was buried in a lead coffin makes scientists hope that the virus has been preserved.

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