I was just reading an LAT article about swine flu, and it included this interesting statistic:

The average age of swine flu victims is 12, the average age of hospitalized patients is 20 and the average age of those who have died is 37, she said.

Now that is really unusual. Usually the majority of deaths from flu are really old people. I'd read before about the puzzling inverted victim demographic on this one.

I think I'm going to go into full geezer mode here for a bit. Please pardon me.

I was a kid in the 1950's and early 1960's, and that was the era before most of the vaccines had been developed against what were then considered standard childhood diseases.

In fact, I remember when the polio vaccine came out. My parents took me to one of the local high schools, and we had to stand in line for a long time. Eventually we came up to a table with a huge tray piled high with sugar cubes. My parents told me to eat one of them. Sure, whatever you say!

Polio really terrified parents back then. And there were other diseases which were pretty nasty, but there wasn't anything to be done about them. So I had all four kinds of measles, and I had mumps, and I had chickenpox. That was considered routine.

I didn't have a peanut allergy or asthma, and I never knew anyone who did. I never even heard of such things until I was full grown. It's now beginning to be realized that the problem modern kids have is that with all the vaccines, their immune systems are never really challenged and so they don't develop properly. Things like asthma and food allergies are the result of an immune system that is hyper-sensitive, so the theory goes.

Not that I'm suggesting going back to having hundreds of kids die every year from measles. Don't get me wrong. But it's an indication of the way that nothing is an unmixed blessing.

Getting back to the flu, it seems that about 45 years ago a strain of flu went around which was antigenically nearly the same as this new one, so us old geezers (most of us) were exposed to it and have at least partial immunity. That seems to be the reason this new one is attacking all the young people and leaving us gray-hairs alone.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 03:37 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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