Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

[swgprop]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

My husband and I were taking 800. My daughter was on 200 and my son was getting half a flinstones so 100. I was also making sure I drank rice milk every day which is fortified with D. My daughter drinks a lot of milk and my son also drinks rice milk. We were also trying to get plently of son so we could get vitamin D the most natural way. Between my two kids, I would say my daughter is the healthier one and gets more vitamin D through milk and sunshine and she was hit the worst. My son has tubes in his ears and allergy issues and his fever never really got over 99 where I had a horrible time trying to keep my daughter's under 103.

Those levels were probably inadequate to provide protection (depending on the sunshine component). Take a look at information here and here.

Best of luck.

[strittmatter]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

This is one bizarre video!

What is the likelihood/validity of this woman's situation being related to her vaccination? Or is it a fake?

2:18 min.
Girl Gets Flu Shot and Can Now Only Walk Backwards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR5p_bD3uLc

er...........good thing this thread is already in the "I've Lost My Mind Just Now" forum.

[Kadriana]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Those levels were probably inadequate to provide protection (depending on the sunshine component). Take a look at information here and here.

Best of luck.

That's why I was trying to make sure they got plenty of sun. They had started harvesting the week before we got sick and it was too loud and dusty to go outside so maybe that was enough to put us over. We're all extremely pale so it doesn't take much for us to get vitamin D from the sun. This is the first time I think I've ever gotten the flu, might have had a mild version once, and definitely the first time for both my kids. My husband had been working on a project outside for the last couple weeks and he's still healthy. My daughter was getting the most sun out of the two kids and she was the worst so I don't know how much of a difference it makes. My son just weaned a couple months ago so maybe that helped him.

[thedanimal]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Those levels were probably inadequate to provide protection (depending on the sunshine component). Take a look at information here and here.

Best of luck.

swgprop, what is the best form to take Vitamin D in? I know there are probably many delivery methods like other vitamins. Thanks.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

swgprop, what is the best form to take Vitamin D in? I know there are probably many delivery methods like other vitamins. Thanks.

I recommend the information and product at http://products.mercola.com/vitamin-d-spray/. It recommends, in order, (1) sunshine, if at sufficiently low latitude and with adequate exposure, (2) safe tanning beds, or (3) sublingual Vitamin D spray. If supplementing Vitamin D, it recommends testing one's Vitamin D levels, as it can be quite difficult to get the dose right otherwise.

I also recommend raw milk from a trusted local farmer, and Carlsons cod liver oil (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001LF39MY), which has a good balance of Vitamin's A and D.

[swgprop]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

swgprop, what is the best form to take Vitamin D in? I know there are probably many delivery methods like other vitamins. Thanks.

I haven't researched the efficacies of different delivery methods, but the Mercola link TPC posted below provides great information on Vitamin D and a variety of other health matters. The key is whatever method you decide - pill, spray, sunshine - you'd be best served by ordering a test to ensure you are hitting target levels of 25-OH Vitamin D.

Here is a link to one provider of tests.

[thedanimal]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Thank you to you both.

[swgprop]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Good article in The Atlantic




Does the Vaccine Matter?

But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government—with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities—has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu. Other plans to contain the pandemic seem anemic by comparison. Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. . . .

Such comparisons have shown a dramatic difference in mortality between these two groups: study after study has found that people who get a flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter—from any cause—as people who do not. Get your flu shot each year, the literature suggests, and you will dramatically reduce your chance of dying during flu season. . . .

Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.”

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Ah - I see at least one reason for Obama declaring this a national emergency. By law, the FDA cannot approve a vaccine for use until and unless it is tested. The swine flu vaccine has not been tested. There is an exception to this law: in a national emergency, the testing can be skipped. By declaring this emergency, Obama has put the kibosh on lawsuits such as the following, from http://www.physorg.com/news174847447.html :

Lawsuit seeks to halt US swine flu vaccination campaign

October 15th, 2009

New York medical workers took legal action Thursday to halt a massive swine flu inoculation program being rolled out across the United States, claiming the vaccines have not been properly tested.

Lawyers for the group filed a temporary restraining order in a Washington federal court against government medical regulators they claim rushed H1N1 vaccines to the public without adequately testing their safety and efficacy.

"None of the vaccines against H1N1 have been properly tested," attorney Jim Turner, one of half a dozen lawyers working on the case, told AFP.

The complaint filed Thursday argued that far from preventing a massive outbreak of swine flu, the "live attenuated influenza virus nasal mist vaccine could trigger" an H1N1 pandemic.
"I don't know of another live vaccine for flu. So you have immediately a new problem you don't have with a killed vaccine," Turner told AFP.

Officials at the National Institutes of Health have said that trials of swine flu vaccine began in August and delivered results last month, showing that the vaccine was well tolerated and produced a robust immune response in older children and adults in good health with just a single dose.

But Turner insisted that "the FDA did not do the proper testing to show safety and efficacy of this vaccine, which is under the law a new drug.

"When I say test data, I don't mean some professor at some medical school somewhere infected some students and said 'I don't see any problems.'

"What I mean is carefully conducted double blind placebo controlled studies trials done in accordance with FDA regulations, and a whole series of them to look at dosing... which are then reviewed by FDA scientists.

"None of that has been done on this vaccination and we're saying the law requires it to be done," Turner said.

The suit was brought on behalf of a group of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel in New York, where health care professionals who see patients are required to be vaccinated against H1N1, Turner said.

If the complaint is upheld, it would stop the roll-out of the H1N1 vaccine nationwide, said Turner, who accused public health officials of hyping the swine flu outbreak.
"Officials have said the virus is so much like the ordinary flu virus that they don't need to do special new drug testing on it because it's just the same old virus with a minor change to it," he said.

"We're saying, if that's the case, then all the hype about this thing being a worldwide threat is misplaced and they've stampeded the state of New York into taking an action they never would have taken if it were just another flu."

Last week, some 2.4 million doses of nasal spray vaccine made of greatly weakened, but live, H1N1 virus were delivered to state and local health authorities around the United States.

Karen Lancaster, a spokeswoman for the MedImmune, which manufactures the nasal spray H1N1 vaccine, told AFP that the the company has had a seasonal flu vaccine made with weakened live virus on the market since 2003.

This week, millions of doses stocks of injectable vaccine were delivered and administered to people in groups deemed to be at particular risk from swine flu, including children and health care professionals.

US public health officials want to vaccinate tens of millions of Americans by year's end against swine flu, which has claimed more than 4,500 lives worldwide since an outbreak of H1N1 was first reported in Mexico in April.
(c) 2009 AFP

[lurker]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

I found this quote to be the best from the Atlantic article:

Studies show that young, healthy people mount a glorious immune response to seasonal flu vaccine, and their response reduces their chances of getting the flu and may lessen the severity of symptoms if they do get it. But they aren’t the people who die from seasonal flu. By contrast, the elderly, particularly those over age70, don’t have a good immune response to vaccine—and they’re the ones who account for most flu deaths. (Infants with severe disabilities, such as leukemia and congenital lung disease, and people who are immune-compromised—from AIDS, or diabetes, or cancer treatment—make up the rest. As of August8, only 36 deaths from swine flu had been confirmed among children in the U.S., and the overwhelming majority of those children had multiple, severe health disorders.)
In Jefferson’s view, this raises a troubling conundrum: Is vaccine necessary for those in whom it is effective, namely the young and healthy? Conversely, is it effective in those for whom it seems to be necessary, namely the old, the very young, and the infirm? These questions have led to the most controversial aspect of Jefferson’s work: his call for placebo-controlled trials, studies that would randomly give half the test subjects vaccine and the other half a dummy shot, or placebo. Only such large, well-constructed, randomized trials can show with any precision how effective vaccine really is, and for whom.

In other words the vaccines may only work as intended in those who would be healthy enough to fight off the flu with little consequence.

This tends to confirm another line in the article that the only flu vaccine study that really showed a benefit to vaccination was in healthy school aged children.

[WildspitzE]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Thank you to you both.

Our itulip friend rogermexico has covered vit d on his blog as well.

paleonu.com
e.g. http://www.paleonu.com/panu-weblog/2...vitamin-d.html

(he has other posts but that was the first one re: vit d that i can recall)

To complement the information that TPC and swgprop posted, on mercola's website (the one that TPC recommended) you'll find the following video (which discusses optimal levels, based on bloodwork):

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...the-Truth.aspx

To reiterate, each person is different, so if you're supplementing make sure that you test over time (and seasons, due to sun exposure) to target supplementation (to reach ideal based on blood work levels).

[WildspitzE]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

I also recommend raw milk from a trusted local farmer, and Carlsons cod liver oil (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001LF39MY), which has a good balance of Vitamin's A and D.

Check out the video I posted in this thread, re: cod liver oil. When you get to the guy, he talks about intake methods. He highlights (25:02ish) how Vit A and Vit D depend on the same receptors, which reduces the effect or absorption of Vit D. I think that it may be relevant with high levels of Vit A only, but still important info.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

Check out the video I posted in this thread, re: cod liver oil. When you get to the guy, he talks about intake methods. He highlights (25:02ish) how Vit A and Vit D depend on the same receptors, which reduces the effect or absorption of Vit D. I think that it may be relevant with high levels of Vit A only, but still important info.

My understanding is that one should have both Vitamins A & D, and avoid excess of either, as too much of one interferes with the other. See for example http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsl...december.shtml . That's one reason I mentioned Carlson's Cod Liver Oil in particular, as it has a closer to equal amount (700 IU Vit A, 400 IU Vit D, on the bottle in front of me.) Many brands of cod liver oil have too much Vit A. I suspect (not sure though) that the video you posted overstates this when recommending no Vit A supplementation in order to maximize Vit D receptivity.

[WildspitzE]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

I think that they say no supplementation past 6000IU, hence my "I think that it may be relevant with high levels of Vit A only, but still important info." Wasn't poopoo'ing your cod liver oil, just highlighting the receptor overlap. Wasn't sure if you or anybody here knew that. 6000IU can be found in 3 airbornes, which I've seen people take 3 a day (the recommended max) when they fear that they're getting the flu/cold. This may inadvertently be working against their efforts bc it may be crowding out any vit d that they may be taking/ingesting.

I don't think that 400IU of Vit D is enough (for the typical office rat, unless you work outside) , but as we both have stated everybody should check their blood levels to get to the right amount (for each time of year).

FWIW - I don't supplement Vit A, as I eat enough foods w/ Vit A or beta carotene. That said, there are times (when I have long business trips/flights, etc) where I do supplement Vit A but I do so in the form of beta carotene.

[c1ue]

Re: Obama declares swine flu a national emergency

I posted recently that someone I met who works in the company that makes the vaccines - via a recent acquisition - told me the following:

1) every employee was given over a dozen doses
2) The company strongly recommended NOT taking the dose unless seriously sick. The side effects would be dramatic

Hmm!