[gg3]

There appear to be three different viruses going around at the moment. An influenza A, and influenza B, and a Norwalk virus. The first two produce the usual fever, chills, body aches, exhaustion, raspy or dry cough, etc, that last a week or at most two weeks. The latter is a stomach bug with vomiting & diarrhea that lasts 24 to 48 hours.

So, what have you had this year, or did you get lucky and duck the bullet? And what "interesting" symptoms have you noted, if any?

Me: Influenza A. Pretty standard except: The exhaustion is really strange, it's as if my brain can't get traction, trying to work is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork. I can do "divergent-thinking" tasks where there is not "one right answer" (e.g. posting here, for example) but any "convergent-thinking" tasks where the goal is to get *the* "right answer" just don't catch. I can't jumpstart my normal "work trance" mode either; feels like I'm stuck in the snow and spinning my tires.

My sense of taste is dead. Everything tastes like sh*t on a shingle. My sense of smell is normal, I just checked it with a bag of Keebler's chocolate chip cookies (which are for me an "index smell" that I know well enough to recognize any deviation from its normal characteristics). But most anything I actually eat, tastes like someone coated it (or the inside of my mouth) with plastic. What's interesting about this is, it would be understandable if my sense of smell were similarly knocked out, but it's not, it's basically normal. And as far as I can tell there is not a coating on the surface of my tongue. So the going hypothesis is that this virus is somehow interfering with the transmission of taste signals at the level of the nerves.

Aside from that, work has been not getting done all week, which is a Very Bad Thing, so hopefully this will be over soon. Multiply by all the people whose productivity is similarly trashed, and it's probably a measurable impact on the economy. Bird Flu is going to be *really* interesting....

[k_semler]

No flu for me, just like almost every other year. The last time I had it was 2 years ago, and it was bad enough that it looked like the TV was playing cartoons, but it was on CNN. I was actually bad enough I wa praying to God to just kill me and end my suffering. It took me about 1.5 mos to get over it. I renember at work after reading the paper wondering if I had SARS. That was the worst I have ever been sick. The time before that that I had the flu was 10 yrs before that, I really don't renember it that much, but it did not seem as bad as it was 2 years ago.

[jato]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he latter is a stomach bug with vomiting & diarrhea that lasts 24 to 48 hours.

[mikela]

Now here's a useful and productive topic. I had the flu this year for the first time in twenty years. It hit me hard at the heels of a cold, and I could hardly lift my head without passing out or wildly evacuating my upper GI tract. I'm told I actually went into seisure. The fever lasted at least four days, but it took weeks for me to fully recover.

[0mar]

I got hit pretty bad I was absolutely bed ridden for like two days.

[lotrfan55345]

I got hit with it BAD.... TWO TIMES too..

The 1st time was quick and sudden, in the space of 30 min my thoughts went to "Am I going to be too tired to go to the movie" to "Should I got to the hospital." I had severe chills and 4 blankets and a space heater didn't help. My fever clocked in at 104.8F and lasted for about 3 days. I was so dazed that I couldn't tell the letters on the keyboard and I couln't type right. The TV looked like it was sideways or something. I pretty much had to stay in bed for 2 days exept for meal times, but sometimes I was too cold to get out of my blankets. This was a Viral infection.



The second time was the one with the worse syptoms, but only lasted 1 night. I felt the coldest I've ever felt in my entire life and I felt the most drained I've ever felt my entire life. I was coughing up blood too, which forced me to go to the Emergency Care or whatever... They found out that I had a bacterial infection (does that count as the flu?)_which set in when my immune system was still week after the 1st time and I had to take anti-biotics. (Zithromax) Now, three-weeks later, I still have the cough, but the blood went away when I took the anti-biotics.

[Falconoffury]

I haven't had anything beyond a mild, temporary fever for 2 years.

[DomusAlbion]

We've got it easy in the USA.

Just imagine poor Africa:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... ngo_plague

[Terran]

No flu for me, it seems pretty ironic that I get the flu every year, but not this year. I believe it's all thanks to my increased consumption of vitamin C. That stuff really helps, for you immune system, and while you have a flu.

[tokyo_to_motueka]

No flu yet but I've got the nastiest and most bizzarre cold I've had for about 10 years.

High temperature in the evening for about 3 nights, then unbearable running nose (+slight fever) for 2 days and now disgusting green stuff...plus a chest cough that is making me really weak. But I haven't been to the doctor and i managed to make it to work every day this week. should've stayed home i suppose.

wife's got the same thing, but as i say, i don't think it's flu cause i wouldn't have been able to get out of bed if it had been. so i hope i've been lucky

[mindfarkk]

i haven't had the flu since i was ten years old and i had it bad for two weeks.

everyone around me may get it, but it skips me.

i have never had a flu shot.

[frankthetank]

Nothing here...my other half had a bad cold early this winter and the flu just a few weeks ago. I didn't get "infected". I really can't say when i had it last. Its been a few years. My secret is lots of sleep(i love sleep!) and a very healthy(lots of fruits!) diet.

[born2respawn]

Flu free, this year. I haven't been ill since I got impetigo after christmas back in '04. For that I blame working 7 days a week and a healthy crop of minor dirty cuts on my hands, I'd still go back to that employer, though.

I've been blessed with a good strong immune system, which is all the more impressive given how generally poor my diet is. The rest of my family came down with nasty coughs over the last few weeks, but I appear to have come through unscathed.

(Touch wood.)

[BabyPeanut]

Got mine from co-workers who were sick.

Found out that colostrum capsules had a profound mitigating effect on the symptoms of my flu.

[uNkNowN ElEmEnt]

My kids and I caught the Norwalk variant. Yeuch! I can't get flu shots cause I'm sensitive to eggs so it would just make me sick anyway. It was unlike anything we've ever caught before and man talk about nasty!

[Falconoffury]

There are eggs in flu shots?

[OilsNotWell]

One of the other topics besides PO that I have followed is the potential for a global influenza pandemic. This distinct possibility has received quite a bit of mainstream press in the last year, most excrutiatingly alarming. Very scary stuff indeed.
You may have heard about Bird Flu, Marburg, or even the recent release of H2N2 via testing kits, but the WSN/33 story is even scarier. Never mind the fact that Bird Flu may have evolved through recombination into human to human transmission, meaning the pandemic might be at our doorstep. But WSN/33 should scare you even sillier...Why?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n December (2004), somebody from one of South Korea's veterinary schools did what hundreds of virus-hunters do the world over: he or she e-mailed to GenBank the genetic details of newly identified viruses. In this case, the posting said, six new strains of influenza had been found in local pigs. Each of the strains were genetically manipulated and contained genetic bits of an avian virus unlike those now prompting separate bird flu concerns.

Worse, there were large segments of a flu bug dubbed WSN/33, a human flu virus altered in 1933 in a laboratory by infecting mice, resulting in a strain that kills mouse brain cells. The original 1933 human virus was related to that which caused the 1918 pandemic flu, killing an estimated 50 million people. Nothing even remotely like the WSN/33 flu has circulated in the world since 1956, and this particular WSN-avian flu combination is not known to have ever occurred naturally, so most of the global population would have little or no immunity to the virus. Since neither the particular bird flu strain nor the WSN/33 flu were known to exist outside of laboratories, one Internet journal concluded that "these sequences could represent a military experiment that resulted in an unplanned release. Moreover, at this point, bioterrorism cannot be ruled out."

[UIUCstudent01]

Could this be why that strain of virus (I think?) was shipped to labs across the USA and made a mass media impact here in the states? To find a possible cure (or, make it..)? I haven't been following this at all. But your information seems credible enough. And if the WHO do something - keep us posted. This seems like it should be a big thing - I wondered what was the deal with this stuff. Never quite connected the dots on the coverage.

Huh. More and more, it seems like the world is just going to implode on itself. Biowarfare - Nuke Warfare Becoming Actually Conceivable in the U.S. (and Israel against Iran) - Peak Oil - Oil Wars - and if that doesn't happen, Climate Change will definitely have an effect.

Geez, more and more, the things I am starting to believe that are very real and possible may seem to the average person a bunch baloney.

I hope Bush and crew don't use this information to start the war in Iran. Oh god, they just might.

[Doly]

I will start worrying about flu and other viruses when I see scary figures. The figures so far are insignificant.

[OilsNotWell]

I apologize if I wasn't clearer, but WSN/33 is not the same as the samples of H2N2 from the 50's that was accidentally released as part of testing kits that were sent to laboratories across the world, samples of which we raced to destroy before an accident happened...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')ll H2N2 flu virus samples destroyed, CDC says
May 3, 2005 (CIDRAP News) – All samples of a potentially dangerous influenza virus that were sent to thousands of laboratories in 18 countries in recent months have been accounted for and destroyed, federal health officials announced today.
Samples of the influenza A(H2N2) virus, which caused the flu pandemic of 1957-58, were sent to more than 6,000 labs for use in testing the labs' ability to identify flu viruses. Most of the labs were in the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the organizations that administer proficiency testing reported that all the samples had been destroyed. No reports of illness have been linked with possible exposure to the samples, the CDC said. The virus has not circulated since 1968, which means that most people now would have little or no immunity to it.
"Certification of the destruction of the H2N2 samples contained in the proficiency testing kits effectively ends the immediate risk associated with distribution of these kits, but it is only the first step of the public health response," the CDC said. A multiagency task force will investigate what caused the inclusion of H2N2 in the test kits, the statement added.