This is probably a silly question but what the heck.
Every plan I check out on the web to prepare for the possibility of a oandemic tells me to “keep informed” which I am already doing or I wouldn’t be on their web site and then “Stay Healthy” because a healthy body can resist infection. Here’s a quote from one site:
Stay Healthy Do everything you can to improve your health. The healthier you are the more resistant your body is to disease. Adopting healthy behaviors such as eating nutritious foods, being physically active, and avoiding tobacco can prevent or reduce the damage done by many diseases, including influenza. Getting your annual flu shot helps - it keeps you from getting sick with this year’s seasonal flu.
My question is, from everything I’ve read about cytokine storms, etc., it is very possible that if this virus turns pandemic, it will attack ESPECIALLY people with very healthy, active immune systems. (People like me, young, with asthma, right?) In fact, I seldom come down with anything — my body kicks most germs off so fast, what knowck my husband out for 3 days just takes me 3 hours to fight off. (Course, I also have “Mommy Antibodies” but I don’t think those will help me against H5N1.) (-:
Anyhow, is this information from the various health department web sites essentially a placeholder? I.E. They actually have no useful information, so they are just telling me to eat healthy because otherwise they would have to say, “Really, nothing you can do?”
Or, should I start smoking? (-:
Well at least I’m one more person who has noticed that……makes you want to really pick a comfortable illness & develop it doesn’t it!
I think “stay healthy” is among the best advice that can be offered in preparing for pandemics. Cytokines are good things :-) and you do want them around. If your body becomes stressed to the point where you don’t have to worry about a cytokine storm, then you’re not going to be able to throw up a decent immune response to anything. Don’t forget that pandemic flu isn’t the only disease we have to worry about - there’s a much greater risk of you getting food poisoning than pandemic influenza, at this point. You have a family, and a life, and the best way to get through that is to be healthy.
I’m working on pandemic planning for my government (but on the animal side, not the human side) and whenever people ask me what I think they should do to prepare in case a pandemic comes, I always say, “Stay healthy and happy.”
I’m not discounting the possibility of people in our age demographic becoming victim to cytokine storms, but the advantages of having a strong, healthy immune system far outweigh the risks.
I’ve noticed it too and have also disagreed with respect to the killing effect of cytokine storms in young people.
It could help to be healthy, though, if you are not in the main cytokine age bracket.
But you know, I know some pretty healthy people (in fact, I can’t imagine how much “healthier” they could get) and they still get the same colds that go around as everyone else. They just don’t get as bad, perhaps. But they still last as long (7–10 days).
I doubt even a healthy person could fight off avian flu, but good general health would prevent you from having to run to the doctor or hospital for other illnesses during a pandemic and get infected.
wanderer at 9:33
“Don’t forget that pandemic flu isn’t the only disease we have to worry about - there’s a much greater risk of you getting food poisoning than pandemic influenza, at this point”
I appreciate your points wanderer and of course do not seriously mean it would be better to be ill than healthy at this moment in time!
However, I still wonder about the lack of more specific advice, and what advice is there seems a tiny bit condescending. (Don’t worry, be happy?)
For instance, if I wanted to work towards preventing food illness (and I do) and I went to a food illness prevention web site, I’d expect to see more than just “stay healthy and eat your vegetables”. I would expect to see other ideas like: blanch raw celery before serving (esp.to children); always rewash bagged lettuce; avoid sprouts; and so on. I wouldn’t be looking for just generalities such as “stay in good health”.
I suspect that, though there are pieces of specific advice people could give regarding prevention of catching pandemic flu, that there is not yet agreement on these, so the web sites I’ve been checking have just avoided everything and are going with the bare minimum? Just a thought.
But they do. They constantly say to wash your hands. The single simplest and most effective way to work at this. Keep hands away from mouth, nose, eyes and ears.
My guess would be that there’s little you can offer people as advice in not catching an airborne illness. There are numerous preventative measures that can be taken against foodborne illnesses (like those you listed above), far fewer for STDs (all I can think of are use protection or don’t have sex) and airborne illnesses (wash your hands, stay away from crowded public places). There isn’t much specific advice that I can think of. Do you have ideas of what you’d like to see added to websites suggesting preventative measures?
It took me a while to figure out why they focus so much on washing your hands. Anti-bacterial soaps will not inactivate a virus. For that matter, washing your hands isn’t going to inactivate the virus either. What is crucial is just that you don’t touch your eyes, nose, mouth etc. with your hands. The virus will “self-inactivate” (for lack of a better word) on its own after a period of 48 hours I believe. I am not sure if you can get it if it merely touches the surface of your skin. I imagine this is something the scientists closest to it don’t even know.
IMHO, washing hands is a good measure for bacteria-based illness, but not viral. It’s not going to help there. But keep the hands away from your eyes etc!
“I doubt even a healthy person could fight off avian flu, but good general health would prevent you from having to run to the doctor or hospital for other illnesses during a pandemic and get infected.”
Or the corollary…good general health would prevent you from having to run to the doctor or hospital for other illness during a pandemic since if a pandemic arrives they will be too overwhelmed to treat you anyway.
Stay healthy. And find other ways to control a potential cytokine storm.
The whole storm thing is still a big unknown with this strain. There haven’t been that many people in the 20–40yo bracket to determine if it will act the same way H1N1 did in 1918. Even if it does, I also don’t know if there is much you can do to prevent it from happening. Obviously this area needs more study. How one person’s body reacts to illness is completely differnt than another’s, even if both are healthy, same age, physical condition, etc. Given the stresses and strains of possible pandeminc, SIP, etc. I thik the healthier you are the better off you’ll be. The last thing you want is chest pains during a pandemic.
Soap won’t inactivate the virus, but washing your hands can wash potentially contaminated material off.
wanderer at 13:40
In reflection, I think what bothers me about the advice to be in the best possible health by “eating your fruits and vegetables, and quit smoking” is that it seems to imply that, the better health you are in, the better you will be able to fight off pandemic flu if it occurs.
My friends who are looking at these web sites and beginning to pay attention are saying to me, “I’m in good health and I eat well, I’ll be fine.” And, who knows, they might well be.
Certainly in geenral it does make sense for everyone to eat well, not smoke, lower their cholesterol, and maintain a healthy weight. But I’m not convinced that anyone knows it is better for your survival of pandemic flu to do those things. Perhaps I was mistaken, my understanding was that in 1918 at least it was the youngest and healthiest people who often most quickly died?
I think it gives people a false sense of reassurance to just put that recommendation on these sites.
wanderer/ricewiki: exactly! hand washing ABSOLUTELY is THE NUMBER ONE preventative measure. Viral and bacterial counts are greatly reduced after a 30 second hand wash. They really didn’t make this one up.
I completely understand where you’re coming from on this one, and I agree that a false sense of security is dangerous. I guess I just don’t know what to tell people. You’re right that it was young people who were hit most hard with the 1918 flu. I don’t know that they were necessarily the healthy ones of their age demographic, I think people often attribute health to youth without thinking.
So we know that the young and potentially the healthy were the hardest hit by the 1918 flu. But what can we do about that? We can’t not be young, and doing anything that has an adverse effect on our health has far greater detrimental than protective effects. Cytokine cascades are too complex for us to understand completely, let alone manipulate.
I believe that the better health we’re in, the better able we’ll be to fight off a pandemic. 1918 was an anomaly in hitting young people the hardest. There’s no way of knowing whether a future pandemic would have the same characteristics. Cytokine storms aren’t guaranteed, and even if they were a certainty, we don’t understand them well enough to know how to prevent them. I don’t think anyone can guarantee that being in good health will have definite protective effects, but I think that the odds are in favour of a healthy immune system being beneficial.
A false sense of security is dangerous, but I don’t think that making reccomendations to live a healthy lifestyle is dangerous. Given that there’s little else the general public can do to prevent themselves from becoming ill, this may be the only advice the government can offer. I can’t think of what other advice besides “quit smoking, eat yer fruits and veggies and wash yer hands” would be useful and applicable.
I completely understand where you’re coming from on this one, and I agree that a false sense of security is dangerous. I guess I just don’t know what to tell people. You’re right that it was young people who were hit most hard with the 1918 flu. I don’t know that they were necessarily the healthy ones of their age demographic, I think people often attribute health to youth without thinking.
So we know that the young and potentially the healthy were the hardest hit by the 1918 flu. But what can we do about that? We can’t not be young, and doing anything that has an adverse effect on our health has far greater detrimental than protective effects. Cytokine cascades are too complex for us to understand completely, let alone manipulate.
I believe that the better health we’re in, the better able we’ll be to fight off a pandemic. 1918 was an anomaly in hitting young people the hardest. There’s no way of knowing whether a future pandemic would have the same characteristics. Cytokine storms aren’t guaranteed, and even if they were a certainty, we don’t understand them well enough to know how to prevent them. I don’t think anyone can guarantee that being in good health will have definite protective effects, but I think that the odds are in favour of a healthy immune system being beneficial.
A false sense of security is dangerous, but I don’t think that making reccomendations to live a healthy lifestyle is dangerous. Given that there’s little else the general public can do to prevent themselves from becoming ill, this may be the only advice the government can offer. I can’t think of what other advice besides “quit smoking, eat yer fruits and veggies and wash yer hands” would be useful and applicable.
There may not be a great deal to do to prevent becoming ill, but there are plenty of products on the market (there have been other threads here) that can help as anti-virals and to dampen any cytokine storm.
As far as washing hands, yes I intend to do that, but I thought because flu is so airborne that handwashing isn’t nearly as valuable as for colds. I assume that is why there has been so much attention to masks, even if they may not be especially effective.
Getting into the habit of not touching your face, nose, eyes etc. takes a while. You’de be suprised at how difficult it is for some people.
Given that many Americans are UNhealthy, ‘stay healthy’ sounds like very good advice.
It’d be even better if more people would follow it. :(
Perhaps an oblique way of saying there’s not much anybody’s gonna be able to do once people start contracting H5N1 in large numbers…
Hi CS, Rose here from our Y2k forum. Nice to run into you again.
“quit smoking, eat yer fruits and veggies and wash yer hands” -
and try and stay healthy enough to not need *any* kind of health care during a pandemic year, because you may be hard put to get it,
is how I like to interpret it. Do wish they would say something more about young and healthy being at risk of cytokine storms, but…
hmmmm… well, how about:
At the present time we do not know anything at all about what a potential pandemic would be like. We do know that it may affect the young and healthy more than the average flu. However there’s not really anything you can do to prevent catching it excapt for staying away from people who have it.
Masks might help but hasn’t been proven. Handwashing might help (has it been proven?) Being healthy to begin with might help, or might not. Tamiflu might help, if you have access to enough ofit. A flu shot might help you avoid getting seasonal flu; which might help you stay out of the drs office thinking you have pandemic flu. And certain vaccinations NOW might help you avoid complications of a pandemic flu.
In addition, since we have your attention, right now you might as well turn to some other areas we, the health community, have been asking you to pay attention to for years. (Insert favorite cause here….) Please lose weight, floss, eat foods in their natural state, and get proper excercise. Use your suscreen and avoid sun during the hours of 10 AM and 3 PM in summer. Get your PAP smear and your colon exam, too. Also, it would help you everyone quits overusing antibiotics because we have a ton of antibiotic resistant bacteria out there which could further complicate matters if people do survice pandemic flu….
OK I guess I can see why websites are sticking with “eat your veggies….”
Chomp, chomp
(Average Concerned Mom is eating her carrots….)
As for not touching your face, etc., would disposable gloves help as well as washing your hands? What about a mask (okay, it won’t cover your eyes, but still)?
The outside of disposable gloves would become just as contaminated as bare hands.
If necessary, to help toddlers and preschoolers not touch their faces, I’m thinking of duck taping their arms to their sides!
I kid you not. I can’t think of anything else that would work! Masks don’t fit and the toddler would just pull it off, anyhow. If I can’t keep them at home during a pandemic situation, that’s what I would have to do.
The ‘stay healthy’ advice (i.e. get a seasonal flu shot) is promoted by public health officials for two reasons:
A seasonal flu vaccine will help you avoid the seasonal flu, and not have to fight off two concurrent infections.
A seasonal flu vaccine will keep help you avoid the seasonal flu, and reduce the risk of H5N1 mixing w/a H2H flu strain (and possibly mutating) in your body.
Bump - so that ‘Closed BroncoBill’ won’t own the ‘Last 50′ list
bump