I do not have any background in the health sciences in any large way. If I attended medical school as a younger man, I feel quite certain I would have frittered my medical education away in much the same fashion I spent my youth behind the desk in High School: day dreaming about time spent out of the classroom. This being said I have no background or expertise in what I am about to write, but as astute readers of this page already know, when has that ever stopped me?
As I see it, public water treatment and proper sewers have done more to keep the public health than billions of flu shots could ever hope to achieve. The world is at war. Microbes live on and in us in numbers no one can fathom. Some are beneficial, like the noninvasive staph organisms, who like dogs co-exhist with humans to both's benefit. Throw out the good staph organism and apply the methacillin resistant staph and it takes every opportunity to infect and sicken its host, talk about the dog that bites the hand that feeds it!
The flu is an organism that invades it's host and takes over its functions to replicate itself causing illness in the host and sometimes even death. The host actually kills itself trying to kill the virus through an exaggerated immune response or develops a secondary infection such as a bacterial pneumonia.
I am told that my grandfather on my father's side contracted Smallpox when he was a toddler in rural Alabama around the turn of the last century. There was no Center for Disease Control back then. But our forefathers and mothers knew what to do even without governmental help. I haven't looked up Smallpox lately, but it does not kill all of its unfortunate hosts. He was taken to an abandoned sharecropper's house with a known smallpox survivor and cared for until his eventual death or recovery and the good news for my father and me was he recovered. When both the caregiver and my grandfather came out of the sick house, it was burned to the ground with all its contents including the clothing. I have a decent immune system on my father's side.
When my father was 7 years old he had a stomach ailment which turned out to be a ruptured appendix.
He was hospitalized in Nashville before antibiotics with a veritable death sentence. His parents and his little sister would spend the day with him crying and hugging and kissing him good-bye and leave for the night not expecting to see him the next day, alive anyway. But he just did not die. An old surgeon finally thought best to open him up after a week and wash the abscess out and sew him back up. He survived even this insult, and passed these superior genes to me, or so my mother says he was my father, but how can anyone be certain of lineage, as honesty between the sheets is not always what it is cracked up to be. Some studies suggest that about one child in seven is not sired by the husband in marriage. Nature will alway insist on genetic diversity.
I am fond of saying, "all women are whores, except for your mother; but her mother was a whore!"
Most people take it well and if you consider what that says, it says it all. We should not get too worked up over those things we cannot change, which brings me back to the flu.
Infections constantly challenge us and our immune systems. I contracted the Hong Kong Flu in 1968 and spent a couple of days in a stupor. I recall how hard it was to concentrate and think. I lived through it and wonder if my immune system was tested and trained for worse insults because of it.
Could it be the flu tunes up our immune system from time to time so it does not become lazy and in some way this could protect us from cancer? Are these vaccinations against non lethal illnesses harming us?
I am not trying to be a kook here, but just wondering if an immune system needs to be worked over from time to time to make sure it is functioning properly like an athlete trains and a student studies.
Does the old adage apply, "if you don't use it, you lose it?" to our immune systems. Is the immune response to a vaccination really a test of the full force of a body challenged?
Every year the great public health officials stress the flu shot, and every few years we have a flu epidemic.
Thankfully we have not seen one like the strain that killed millions in 1918, but odds are we will see it again some day.
Flu shots are associated with Guillian Barre syndrome, again a disease where the immune process harms itself. I wonder what the trade off is for the flu vaccinations. Does it make our immune systems weak?
I challenge someone to run the numbers.
I need to go blow my nose as it has begun to run and itch. Now where did I put that penicillin?
Jackson Delano Maybolt, President Urban Poverty Law Center
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