Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D | Hacker News Reader

Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D

medicalnewstoday.com

7 pointsadammichaelc5 comments

A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.

Is anyone else tired of these doomsday prophecies? Everyone was hysterical about H1N1 and it turned out to be milder than "normal" flu in the end. I'm not trying to say anything about the rest of the article, I'm just really tired of the attitude.

It's estimated that, in United States, about 40,000 people a year die in highway accidents. If we adopted the same sensationalist attitude, we could compare it to the Vietnam War, which (according to Wikipedia) claimed the lives of 58,236 US soldiers, over the course of several years. Obviously, highway accidents will be the doom of United States, right?

Sorry, rant over.

Sensationalist attitude? The 1918 influenza epidemic killed an estimated 100 million people at a time when the world was a lot 'smaller' than it is today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic

The H5N1 virus is wickedly deadly and treatment options are limited. Fortunately it hasn't yet mutated into a form that's easily transmitted between humans.

And then there's the SARS scare which might have been a little over the top but it had all the right ingredients: high morbidity and highly contagious.

Sorry that you find this stuff tiring but the risks are real.

I believe that the risks are real, I really do. I'm not disputing that. The reason why the attitude tiring is because medical issues have been handled very badly in the last few years. To be honest, it might also be that I started paying more attention to it in those few years and it has always been handled badly.

My point is that it's becoming really hard for an average person today to decide how to react to information from medical field. Every now and then there's a report of a "new study" which "concludes" this or that about some disease or condition or disorder. More often than not, the study is not really a study but a theory, or it's not sound for this or that reason, or it's not new, or it doesn't really conclude anything yet, etc. Plus, on top of it, you get stuff like that whole fiasco with vaccines.

What I'm driving at is that the way this stuff is handled makes it really hard for ordinary people like me to make decisions. If it was just about me, then I wouldn't worry so much, but my son is three years old and each time a new "threat" appears, I have to decide what to do.

Finally, regarding the article, was it really necessary to start it that way? Yes, the risks are real, but how does stating them yet again contribute to the article?

Aside from the experience in his ward, mostly the other evidence seems to be the correlation between winter and the spread of influenza. There may be other causes for that correlation besides vitamin D (or they might all be contributing factors), such as: -People spend more time indoors, closer to other people. If the virus is airborne or spread through human contact, transmission rates would naturally go up in the winter. -People travel during the holidays so the virus has more opportunity to spread around: more people trapped in airplanes with sick people, and more sick people moving viruses from point A to point B.

That said, I'd like to see more evidence and discussion of whether taking vitamin D supplements are worthwhile, I suspect they are but am not convinced entirely by this article.

Sometimes I want to move out to the country to get away from these types of risks. And to get away from the traffic, overcrowding, etc...

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