Inappropriate Comments by Politicians. Why Flu Vaccination?

Bathing caps, Sirmione

Today's inappropriate comment include:

President Trump's
"Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody's ever seen anything like this. What is your death count as of this moment? 17? 16 people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together."

Boris Johnson's
“They’ve got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, to turn it into the next Dubai,” Johnson said. “The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies away and then we will be there.”

On Brexit, the EU parliament passed a motion with a large majority, warning that “sufficient progress has not yet been made” on agreeing the divorce deal, hindering progression on to the next stage of talks on the trade relationship.

After helping Jane with the design of a particularly difficult book cover and hosting one of our authors for a discussion on the setting of a book to be republished, I ended up at Tesco's pharmacy for my annual flu jab. Having established that I wasn't pregnant and did not react to exposure with eggs, I had a remarkably painless inoculation. In fact, if I hadn't started feeling slight twinges in my shoulder a couple of hours later, I wouldn't have believed a needle pierced my skin. But why bother?

In 1918, the Spanish flu infected about 500 million and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide. It was caused by the first outbreak of a particularly virulent strain H1N1. Variants of this strain still feature in the mixture of inactive viruses used for my inoculation. Viruses rapidly and continuously mutate and adapt. In part influenza viruses can do this by exchanging material between strains that infect humans and our domesticated birds and animals.

Infections peak in the winter months in temperate zones and can tick over throughout the year in warmer climes. With the interconnected world we live in, they exploit both birds and our very convenient mobility around the world and then rapidly spread in new unprotected hosts. There have been four more pandemics since Spanish flu, the last in 2009/10. Fortunately, they have not been lethal to the same degree.

Vaccination is the only real protection against influenza and other viral illnesses at present.