Misinformation going viral

Written by Fred Musante
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 11:23

Good news, folks. The governor’s office announced last week that the first 20,000 doses of the H1N1 flu vaccine have arrived in the state at last.

Not so fast! While the H1N1 flu (aka “swine flu,” aka “novel H1N1 influenza”, aka “that thing that’s going around”) spent the summer making people sick in the Southern hemisphere, it gave the usual fools in the United States time to decide that getting vaccinated for it is a bad idea.

Last week, a state representative told me that his oncologist told him not to get a flu shot, and he is now telling other people not to as well.

We laughed in September when Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi (aka Khadafy, aka Gaddafi, aka the Colonel Crazy) told the United Nations that the H1N1 flu was created by a military biological warfare laboratory — or by a pharmaceutical corporation, take your pick, because he said that, too.

But this was a member of the Connecticut General Assembly. You expect more from somebody in the state Legislature.

His oncologist told him not to get a flu shot because his cancer treatment left him with a compromised immune system. He said the oncologist also told him the flu shots are ineffective, because the vaccine makers used last year’s version of the virus, and it has mutated since then.

That second reason is one of the myths that immunization naysayers have spread around this fall as flu season started. You could say they’ve gone “viral,” like a word-of-mouth marketing campaign. Too bad we don’t have a vaccine for misinformation.

Another phony story is that the swine flu is “mild,” and you’ll only get a little sick if you get sick at all. Others say that the vaccine is being rushed to the public before being tested for dangerous side effects, that it could cause Guillain-Barre syndrome, that all a person needs is a flu shot for the other “seasonal” flu, and that you can get the flu from eating or handling pork meat.

Crazy right-wing tea-baggers have gone completely bananas over the flu immunizations. They say that the swine flu pandemic is a “big government” plot by President Obama and the Democrats in Congress to spend more money. They say it is a pretext for the Department of Homeland Security to quarantine conservatives in concentration camps. Cue the black helicopters and Richard Wagner soundtrack.

The wing nuts are surely crazy. But it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn the government has contingency plans that include quarantines, travel restrictions and mass immunization clinics in the event of a virus pandemic. I would hate to see the country caught unprepared if a virus hit.

But what about these other stories? The truth is they are just as wrong.

Nobody got Guillain-Barre syndrome, an immune system disorder that can cause paralysis or death, from the regular flu vaccine. The swine flu vaccine is made the same way, and nobody in the medical trials got G-B either.

Yes, that’s right — they have done medical trials. And if the trials had discovered anything wrong with the vaccine you can bet you would have heard about it. Since the H1N1 flu first appeared, the news media has tended to err on the side of panic, and it has erred often enough.

The trials also confirmed that the vaccine is quite effective. It is even more effective than the government thought it would be. Last summer, the CDC said it took two shots three weeks apart to get immunity, but the medical trials showed it only took one.

A seasonal flu shot won’t protect you against the H1N1 flu or vice versa. I could write a book about why, but let it suffice to say the reason is the flu viruses have differently numbered Hs and Ns.

No one has ever gotten this swine flu from swine, or from eating pork or hot dogs or anything else with pork in it. They originally called it “swine flu” because it was an H1N1 flu, similar to other strains that were called swine flu, not because it had anything to do with pigs.

As a matter of fact, a herd of pigs in the Southwest had to be destroyed last spring when they caught the swine flu from people. How’s that for irony?

As for its being mild, don’t count on it. The majority of people who caught it only came down with the normal symptoms. But hundreds of people had high fevers, diarrhea and vomiting bad enough to land them in the hospital, and a quarter of them died.

A lot of the worse cases were young children or people with other, underlying medical conditions that made them more susceptible to complications, such as diabetes.

It is true that the areas hardest hit by H1N1 last spring have the lightest incidence right now. But it is still very early in the flu season, which usually peaks in January or February.

But not always. The pandemic in 1968 was raging in December.

The Spanish flu of 1918-19, the worst in recorded history that killed between 50 million and 100 million worldwide, first appeared in the United States in March 1918, subsided and returned over the summer, hit the U.S. hardest in October and November, and didn’t disappear until June 1919. By that time it had killed 675,000 Americans, at a time when the population was about a third what it is today.

Healthy, young adults came down with flu symptoms in the morning and were dead by midnight.

That’s what gives epidemiologists nightmares, the thought of that kind of virus spreading from city to city on the wings of jet airliners. The Spanish flu never had it so good.

The only thing that can stop it is mass immunizations — flu shots. Once enough people get vaccinated, the flu just sputters out, unable to find new hosts to infect.

My state representative friend said his oncologist told him not to worry, because he’d get Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug, if he catches the flu. But look up the warnings. Tamilflu’s side effects include delirium, panic attacks, hallucinations, increased risk of self-injury and other abnormal behavior.

His best protection from the H1N1 flu is for everyone else to get vaccinated. How’s that for irony?