Have you gotten a flu shot yet? I'm sitting here with a sore left arm, so yes, I've gotten mine. I have very few "soapbox" issues, and vaccination is one of them, so please, pretty please? Get your flu shot. "But I never get sick," you say? I don't care. Go to Walmart (or anywhere in public for that matter) on any random Wednesday and you could contract every nasty virus known to man, including the flu, so you should be protected. Are you ever in contact with babies? Little kids? Pregnant women? Older people? Sick people? Any people? Then you need a flu shot to help prevent spreading it to these susceptible people. Getting the flu as a "healthy" person is no picnic either. In med school (the lecture years), we were told that you can diagnose the flu by a person laying in your office, unable to move because they feel sooooo crappy. Stay away from that.
I went to my friendly, neighborhood pharmacist at a grocery store and about 10 minutes later, I was vaccinated.
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| H1N1 !! |
"But I had one last year, I'm good," you say? It doesn't work like that. Anyone up for a quick game of "Introduction to Immunology?" Great! In a super fast nutshell, every time you're in contact with a new bug, or part of a bug, your immune cells go, "Wait!! I've never seen this before, have you?" And their neighbor white cell responds, "No dude, I haven't either. Let me call the T helper cells, we'll get this straightened out." And thus begins a beautiful orchestra of immunological complicated-ness that leaves you with cells to fight the current "infection"/vaccination, and others that will promise to remember this bug so that next time they can call the troops faster and better. For some infections (polio is an example off the top of my head), those memory cells work for life. For most others (common cold, influenza, tetanus), they work for much shorter than that. Your "titers" (amount of good fighting antibodies in your blood) to influenza go down pretty quickly, so that by the time the next flu season comes around, you're naked again. Naked!
The three strains in this year's vaccine are the same as last years (including H1N1), so after getting this year's shot, your cells will be like "Oh! I remember this! Thanks for the refresher, we've got your back". Now of course, there are a bazillion (that's a scientific estimate) strains of the flu virus out there, so you won't be fully protected against ALL of them, but the three in the shot are considered the most likely to cause problems for that season, and the most deadly (H1N1 anyone?)
NO, you will NOT get the flu from getting the flu shot. The shot contains dead viruses-D-E-A-D. Sometimes people feel crappy after they get a shot, but that's just their immune system doing a bang-up job of making a good response. So go forth, get vaccinated and stay out of (viral) trouble
Eating brown sugar toffee cookies after a shot will make you feel better,
("Dr") Amy
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