How is your health and your friends....?

How is your health and your friends....?

Postby Tom Jeffries » Fri Apr 10, 2015 7:02 pm

Heh - I have a question - Anecdotally.

Many of my friends are sick and not just sick - like, s i c k. They are down for the count.

Are you hearing the same thing?

I sure hope not.

I am just shocked, because these folks never get weird coughs and worse.

Odd.
Tom Jeffries
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 694
Joined: Mon May 06, 2013 9:06 am

Re: How is your health and your friends....?

Postby jon » Fri Apr 10, 2015 7:26 pm

Even for those who don't get 'flu shots, The Herd Effect protects them when a lot of those people around them have had their annual flu shot.

Unfortunately, the flu shot this year did not target the type of flu that we ended up getting across Canada, so most people got little or no protection from it, either directly or indirectly. Admittedly, there are some people for whom an annual flu shot does increase their general resistance to all forms of the 'flu and even the Common Cold.

In Alberta, for example, we have had 99 flu deaths this year, the most since statistics started being kept in the mid-1990s.
User avatar
jon
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 9256
Joined: Mon May 08, 2006 10:15 am
Location: Edmonton

Re: How is your health and your friends....?

Postby Tom Jeffries » Fri Apr 10, 2015 8:26 pm

Thanks, Jon.

Here in Vancouver - big time pneumonia and coughy/colds.

This year has been BRUTAL>

Stay healthy, my friends.
Tom Jeffries
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 694
Joined: Mon May 06, 2013 9:06 am

Re: How is your health and your friends....?

Postby jon » Fri Apr 10, 2015 8:57 pm

Can you imagine having several children with whooping cough?

Ottawa mother of 7 abandons anti-vaxxer views as kids hit with whooping cough
Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: April 9, 2015
Last Updated: April 9, 2015 4:38 PM EDT

It was “the kind of cough that stops a parent’s heart,” says Tara Hills, who has seven children and has heard them cough many times before.

Just another cold, she thought at first. But her family’s journey into whooping cough treatment has forced them to re-examine what they believed about vaccination, knowledge and responsibility in a community.

Now the Hills family has gone public with their story, saying it’s important to help others understand the risks of not having vaccinations.

Their children, who range in age from 10 months to 10 years, were sick as April began. Most of the symptoms were just cold symptoms, Hills says. Runny noses, no fever.

“But it’s when they cough. This is a cough you’ve never heard before.”

That’s why they arrived at CHEO at 4 a.m. on April 2. It took four days for the lab to confirm whooping cough, and antibiotic treatment began this Tuesday. The parents aren’t sick, but the kids are all confined to their home for five days, at which point Ottawa Public Health says they won’t be contagious.

Tara Hills was stunned. “I thought: Am I actually looking at whooping cough in the face? Could it be possible?”

The disease was one of those historical oddities she never even thought about dealing with, like smallpox or diphtheria.

But she and her husband, Gavin, had chosen not to have their children fully vaccinated — not through strong opposition, but more from uneasiness about the medical system.

Tara Hills wrote in a blog post about how they gave their first three children some vaccinations then stopped: “We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust. Was the medical community just paid=off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.

“For years relatives tried to persuade us to reconsider through emails and links, but this only irritated us and made us defensive.”

And she adds: “I said before that the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m writing this from quarantine. For six years we were frozen in fear from vaccines, and now we are frozen because of the disease.”

The blog post at thescientificparent.org has drawn more than two million views. It’s called Learning the Hard Way: My Journey from #AntiVaxx to Science.

The family wondered about the wisdom of their choice not to vaccinate when measles broke out at Disneyland earlier this year. The Hills began reading widely about vaccines. There was also a smaller measles outbreak that affected some people they knew. Then came the whooping cough.

“When I connected the dates for everyone involved it chilled me to the bone,” Tara wrote. “I looked again at the science and evidence for community immunity and found myself gripped with a very real sense of personal and social responsibility before God and man.”

“I think they’re sort of, maybe, slightly improving,” she said of her children Thursday. At the very least, they don’t seem worse.

Her youngest has been especially sick, coughing up “stringy” phlegm, but she notes that “he’s big enough that this isn’t life-threatening for him.” Still, she worries about what might have happened if her family had infected a younger infant.

Now she hopes “to encourage other parents who can relate to where we were starting from: who were confused, who were scared.”

She and her husband “had lost faith in the system. It’s kind of irrational but it’s powerful and I think a lot of people relate to that place.”

She was never prepared for diseases that didn’t seem to be part of modern times at all.

“It is so historically removed from me. It doesn’t seem like an imminent threat, and so when something doesn’t seem imminent, you don’t deal with it. If something’s happening overseas, I’m not taking preventive measures over here.”

She and her husband are “frazzled and sleepless” but said Thursday that Ottawa Public Health has been “awesome” and as for the children’s illness, “the ship seems to be turning around.”

But there has still been fallout for others. The Hills’ neighbour, Jennifer Eady, has had bronchitis and suddenly found herself under a Public Health order that wouldn’t let her go to work, in case her illness turned out to be whooping cough.

“I’m a single mom and I didn’t get paid” for missing two days, she said.

Lab tests later confirmed she doesn’t have whooping cough, but she is still unhappy that many neighbours were put at risk by one family’s decision not to vaccinate.
User avatar
jon
Advanced Member
 
Posts: 9256
Joined: Mon May 08, 2006 10:15 am
Location: Edmonton


Return to Non Radio Related Topics

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 72 guests