Word: flu
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...However, even though young people are not at risk for flu complications, college students are particularly likely to spread disease. They live together in close quarters and eat buffet-style, which makes it easier for someone sneezing over the rice pilaf to get everyone else sick. College students encourage each other to share shot glasses at parties or engage in other kinds of “intimacy” that may be conducive to the spread of disease...
...biggest reason students stay away from vaccines is that they assume they won’t get the disease, either because they’re “careful” or because they don’t usually get it. Given that people can infect others with the flu starting the day before symptoms appear and up to five days after that, simply keeping away from those who look sick is not a viable option to avoid the flu. And there’s no evidence that certain people are genetically less susceptible to the flu...
...reason I want you to get a flu shot isn’t that it helps you, though it clearly does. I want you to get it because it helps me. Since the only way to get the flu is from direct or indirect contact with another person who is infected, each new student who is vaccinated will decrease the chances of infection for the entire community. On a large enough scale, even vaccinated people benefit from others getting the shot, because it limits the number of human vessels the flu can use as a base to mutate into...
...benefit, however, is predicated on annual inoculation. Annual flu shots are necessary because the flu mutates much more quickly than other viruses like the measles or polio. Part of the reasons those diseases are now so rare or nearly extinct is that, in the U.S., infants are vaccinated against them while still in the hospital, keeping them inoculated for life...
...This just isn’t possible with the flu. Each year, the vaccine consists of several strains of virus that were active the last year, but new mutations crop up all the time. That’s why it’s possible to get the flu even with the vaccine...