A few years ago two house guests, ages mid-70s and early 30s, arrived on my doorstep with bad cases of upper respiratory illness. Their temps were 102 and 105, respectively (BTW 102 is really high for an elderly person), their heart rates were elevated and their breathing was labored. I was quite worried about the older guest's illness because he was also a diabetic, so I called a doc friend of mine to ask what I should do. He advised me to take them to the Harborview ER immediately, which I did. They got chest x-rays, IV fluids and a couple of prescriptions--I forget for what. I brought them back to my house the same night and over a week or so they gradually recovered. My doc friend also strongly advised to get my own doc to give me a Tamiflu prescription the next day and a flu shot ASAP, which I hadn't done that year. I had never heard of Tamiflu and I had to go halfway across town to get it because the pharmacy in my neighborhood didn't have any. I got a flu shot the next day at the Health Dept. downtown, and took 4 Tamiflu pills over the next two days. I continued to go to work as usual and felt totally fine in spite of spending time with my friends in the evenings taking care of them the best I could. Maybe my immune system was extra robust, or maybe the Tamiflu protected me. On the other hand maybe the flu shot protected me, but I think it would have taken some time to jolt my body into producing high enough antibody levels to do much good in the face of that bout of ongoing exposure to the virus.

A couple of weeks ago I tried to volunteer to be one of the first people in the general population given the new H1N1 vaccine in a study being conducted locally by Group Health, but I was not selected. That was disappointing because this season we need to not only get vaccinated for H1N1, we also need to get vaccinated for regular seasonal flu. Both vaccines may not be available at the same time and place.

For more info about this, check out this CDC webpage:

http://www.cdc.gov/H1N1flu/qa.htm

If you regard flu as a fascinating epidemiological phemenonon, you will find this book to be a page-turner as well as an epidemiological thriller about the 1918 flu, which laid waste to hundreds of millions of people worldwide:

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Influenza-De…

There were actually three waves of flu starting in 1918, and the second wave was a huge killer. Some people went to work as usual in the morning and died the same day. The 1918 flu was especially harsh on people in the prime of life, as the death rate for people 20-50 was much higher than the death rate for kids and older people.

My advice is let's not blow this off folks. Be diligent and get BOTH shots as soon as the vaccines are, even if it's a bit inconvenient, because the more people who have antibodies in their bloodstreams, the harder it will be for both forms of influenza to spread in the human population. This next wave of H1N1 may be no big deal, but why take chances if you can get vaccinated?