As it does every year, the flu bug is making its way across the province, and through the entire country.
And while we may play it off as just a “bug” the flu can be a very serious illness, even fatal as it has been for 23 Albertans already this year.
I’ve never had the best immune system. Someone else’s scratchy throat somehow always turns into a full-blown cold for me, leaving me bed ridden
But in my attempts to avoid getting sick, I’ve been getting a flu shot for at least the last five years now, ever since the H1N1 epidemic.
Two weeks after getting my shot this year I watched as my roommate came down with what I’m sure was the flu – fever, aches and pains, and lungs that were clearly working harder than they should be.
I braced for the coming illness that would inevitably hit me, I was surprised to not even suffer a tickle in my throat. My new invincibility also inflated my ego a bit, and I tired not to rub it all in my suffering roommates face.
Of course I credited my health to the flu shot I had received and when I scolded her for not getting one too, she simply said “I don’t need it.”
My roommate is under the same conception of many healthy 20-40 year olds – flu shots are for pre-schoolers, the elderly, or people with an auto-immune disease.
And while those people absolutely do need a flu shot too, healthy 20-40-year-olds are not always able to fight off the flu in a week or two like my roommate did.
Last year I met a Strathmore woman who was infected with H1N1 back in 2009. She too didn’t feel that she needed a flu shot, she’d never had one before and had stayed reasonably healthy. Unfortunately for her, the flu mutates every year, and the H1N1 strain targeted healthy adults particularly hard. She wound up in a coma for months on life support, all while she was pregnant. To say the least, six years later, both she and her daughter who was born weighing only a pound, are still suffering the health consequences.
H1N1 is still circulating, though this year it’s not the dominant strain. The H3N2 is the primary strain going around and is unfortunately targeting the elderly exceptionally hard. This is compounded by the fact that this year’s vaccine is only a 40 per cent match to the H3 strain, meaning that even if you get the vaccine there’s still a 60 per cent chance of getting H3N3.
That being said, a partial match is better than no match at all. You may be able to fight off the flu, but there are many in our community who can’t, and the best way to make sure you aren’t passing on the flu is to avoid getting it at all.
