I’d just read about the healthy ESPN host, Ed Aschoff, who died from pneumonia brought on by Influenza when my sister was admitted to ER for the same thing.
Don’t want to lose anyone here to it, so if you come down with it, please don’t hesitate or wait too long to get help fighting it. How healthy you were before you caught it doesn’t mean much to this flu.
Wishing you all the best,
-Jeff
Damn. 34 years old and healthy. Way too young.
Ironically it’s often not the virus that kills, but the body’s response to it. If we could get a handle on stopping the immune system from over-reacting, it would save tens of thousands of lives each year.
Always get the flu shot.
There’s also a pneumonia shot you can get too.
Agreed
I got chastised for saying this in the anti-vax topic because apparently this one doesn’t count. I’ll say it again anyway. The flu is not something you should mess with. It absolutely kills the young and healthy every year… get your flu shots.
Hear freaking hear. I really don’t understand why people who should know better don’t.
Like my own mostly intelligent sis, who has a bit of a paranoid streak so she must have gotten influenced by the anti-vaxxer BS at some point.
About that guy with probably more than half his life ahead of him: just horrible.
That’s crazy. I thought pneumonia was something that old people die of.
When I was in the hospital last winter, a big muscular football player (I only know he was muscular because he didn’t have a shirt on while they worked on him) in his 20’s coded in the hall right outside my room. His family was crying and kept saying “How could this happen from the flu?” I felt so bad for them. It was evident his lungs filled with fluid from the massive immune response his body mounted to fight it. I don’t know if he ended up surviving or not. I hope he did.
Moral to the story, get the frickin’ flu shot.
Needs to be written in 50 foot high flaming letters.
And hope you get a strain that the vaccine was effective against. My sister gets all her shots every year, but still got influenza. But the severity of what she’s dealing with may be much less because the vaccine prepared her system. I wish we could make vaccines like this mandatory for everyone who can handle them. For every person who avoids becoming a vector for the disease due to the vaccine working, countless people are spared in an expanding exponential fashion.
Yes, it’s worth pointing out that the flu vaccine can’t cover every strain of flu. Strains mutate, by the time the vaccine is out there, we’ve got new viruses. You could still get the flu despite being vaccinated. The math still works out in favor of vaccinating though, why not get as much protection as possible?
Got it most of my adult life. Never seemed to make a difference. So I don’t bother anymore. I’m pretty healthy so not really worried about it.
I ended up with myocarditis from the flu, almost everyone thought I was having a heart attack at first and ended up in the cardiac ICU for over a week. I was 31 at the time, had been healthy, but didn’t get flu shots. Now I get one every year.
Check a site like Snopes or whatever to confirm, but I think that even if the people in charge pick the wrong strain to immunize against and you get another strain of flu, isn’t the shot still supposed to lessen the severity?
The vaccine is for a few strains out of the hundreds possible. In my line of work the shot was mandatory, so all of coworkers had it as well. Every year the flu would still go around. I get that it helps, and it can’t hurt, just not worried enough to go out of my way for it.
It is supposed to reduce the severity, yes, but even though it isn’t 100% effective, due to the herd effect if everybody got the shot many, many less people would get sick, and less would die too. Even if you’re a kid and still think you’re invincible think about your family, your coworkers, anyone that may be immunosuppressed. You could be killing them.
The shot is free and only takes 10 minutes. If you’ve ever had the flu you know it’s miserable. Get the shot.
Exactly, and this isn’t hit nearly hard enough: Vaccination is not just about you.
Agree 100% with the vaccines that prevent diseases, the flu shot doesn’t. The comments in this thread are completely overdramatic.