What is on Your Mind?

I'll take A(H1N1) vaccine next year ... if I'll need one

This flu has already killed healthy young men in my area. I'm getting it. Vaccines are not a treatment! Only a prevention. By the time you get it, it's too late for a vaccine to work! There are a few actual antiviral drugs out there now, like tamaflu, but they are not vaccines. Derived from cultured viruses. Derived from -- not actual "live" viruses. The point of a vaccine is to present the right immune triggers to your body without actually infecting you. To this end they take the virus and damage it, make it uninfectious.

I'd also add that in considering whether to get the vaccine or not, you should not only consider the danger to yourself of the infection and the (smaller) risks of the vaccine, but the danger you'd represent to others if you got infected. Higher vaccination rates mean much smaller transmission rates, too.

Ive past the risk age...

Hence you're extremely unlikely to die from it. You could still act as a carrier.

I agree completely with Corona688.

The A(H1N1) vaccine, as made by Sanofi Pasteur, is made by the same procedure as the seasonal flu vaccine. Basically, they take an attenuated (shorted piece) of a dead virus and make the vaccine, so it is next to impossible to get H1N1 from the vaccine.

Everyone should get immunized because it is good for overall public health. As Corona said, each person who is immunized stops "viral growth" because they are not infectious.

Also, the cost of the vaccine is small compared to the misery (for you and everyone around you) if you do get it.

I wish I could get it here in Northern Thailand, but I can't. It is not available to people who are not government officials, royalty, etc.

FWIW, I get the seasonal flu vaccine every year and keep my immunizations up to date for a number of reasons. One, I don't like to get sick and Two, I consider it my social responsibility to immunize against infectious diseases.

If the vaccine could be transported via FedEx and not destroyed due to temperature, I would ask someone to go get a dose of A(H1N1) vaccine and FedEx to me in this primitive place I live and work!

The misery is a good point. I doubt that the flu can kill me. But when I have the flu I am in real bad shape for 3 or 4 days and it takes about 2 full weeks to completely recover.

The injected vaccine is a shard of a virus and cannot cause the flu. But the inhaled vaccine is live virus and can cause the flu. Folks my age need to avoid the inhaled vaccine.

There was a poll the other day in a local paper in Zurich asking much the same thing.

86% of people said they didn't intend to (be vaccinated).

To the question "are you worried about it (schweinegrippe)?" the answer was much the same. Seems people here think it's much a do about nothing (in other words over-blown).