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Originally Posted by TotalMILF
Also, live vaccines (most of the flu shots) are known to often cause some symptoms of the disease they are meant to prevent.
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Actually, flu shots use DEAD vaccines. I believe that some alterntative forms of delivering vaccine (i.e., the nasal spray) may use live vaccine.
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Originally Posted by JamesB
You see, the problem is two-fold. First, the makers of the seasonal flu shots have to attempt to predict the strain(s) of the flu that are going to erupt as the season's problematic variants. This is at very best a crap-shoot. Think of this as a really bad version of meteorology.
The second inherent problem is that strains of the flu are very plastic - that is, their 'makeup' is highly subject to change/modification. Viruses and bacteria are (generally) adept at 'communicating' their genetic blueprints and swap identities readily. This is problematic when you design a flu shot since you are sort-of posting 'wanted' photos of pathogens that you anticipate being problematic. The flu has the impressive ability to change its identity very readily whilst maintaining its virulence.
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I would not classify it is a crap shoot - the vaccine makers have largely been successful in predicting the dominant strains each year. This is year they got it wrong and the effectiveness is less than normal. In previous years, they have tended to forecast correctly.
Oddly enough, as to your second point, the comingling of viruses is the very reason that poultry workers in Asia were given standard flu shots a couple of years ago. The fear is that H5N1 (Avian flu) would borrow coding from human flu virus and become transmittable by humans to humans. By keeping the poultry workers free of human flu, they were attempting to stopp Avian flu from encountering human flu and it (H5N1) learning how to move from person to person.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/11/news/health.php
That's my educated opinion.