Stuff You Should KnowStuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no f…Every year the flu virus makes the rounds, laying up young and old alike for days before moving on to another hapless victim. But flu viruses can mutate and once in awhile they turn into something much deadlier, a pandemic that can kill millions. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode.
Ooh god, Hi everybody, it's Chuck here. Oh boy. My selection this week is Hell the Flu Works, and I'll give you one reason why. This is from November fourteenth, twenty seventeen. H I hope you like it. I'm going back to bed. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry. This is Stuff you Should Know about the flu, which I have.
You know the flu?
Do you? I don't know, man, I can't. I can't. I've been on the planet for forty one years. Okay, I still can't really tell the difference between a flu and a cold.
I think the difference that I can tell, and I don't get a flu much. You know, always get the stomach bug, which, as it turns out, is not a flu I just learned. But I don't get the flu flu much. But I can always tell though when I'm super achy, like the flu just makes me feel like dog doodoo. Right, Where's the cold? Is just a big inconvenience?
Yeah, I've had uh no, I've definitely had like lots of aches and I woke up like shivering one night.
I don't see you. I had a fever, for sure, I guess.
So, I guess it must have just been one night in the middle of the night. So that's that's the flu, right, probably, So I guess I do have the flu. No, no joke, everybody.
Well, I'm erecting the clear glass in between us.
Yeah. I think that I've had it long enough now based on the research from this article that I'm not contagious, or else I would have called this off.
So did you get it in New York?
I wonder, I think so. Yeah, I'm letty New York, right, Yeah, Which I was like, I was just walking walking around like with my hands inside of a couple of like plastic Dwayne Reid bags and it still didn't work.
Well, that was your problem probably right there, Dwayne Reid.
Because I didn't take them off when I ate gross. Yeah. So, yes, we were in New York for some Bellhouse shows, right, those went pretty well?
Yeah, I thought they were great.
All right, So the flu. We won't reminisce about past victories. We'll just talk about the flu instead.
Yeah, how about a stat right off the get go? Here?
Okay, the flu. And also sorry everybody for the sniffling that we knew inevitably happen. I'm trying hard not to do it.
You're a method podcaster, all right, which is also what I said in my very first episode. That's right, remember that. Yep, it's not any funnier now. So the CDC right here in Atlanta Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the CDCP.
No, they just stuck with the original.
Yes, they reckon that. About five to twenty between five percent and twenty percent of United States people's get the flu each year, compared to about ten percent to twenty five percent in dirty cold Canada.
Right, I know. And normally when you get the flu, it's just you're laid up for a couple of days, right, Yeah, like you said, you feel like dog do or something like that. Yeah, that's the seasonal flu. But even with the seasonal flu, which usually here in the United States or in North America runs from what like October to March, yeah roughly. Uh, and then I didn't really think about this before, but in the Southern Hemisphere it runs the opposite and actually peaks in August, right, Yeah, most of the time, it's just an inconvenience for you, but it actually kills people sometimes.
Yeah, it can be dangerous for sure.
So in two thy eleven and twelve that was a pretty low year, and for deaths from the flu in the US, there were twelve thousand people who died from the flu or complications from the flu. Twenty twelve thirteen flu season, fifty six thousand people died that year, and I think the average is something around thirty six thousand people in the US die from the flu every year.
Yeah, and apparently the World Health Organization says around the world as many as a quarter of a million people to a half a million people can die every year from the flu.
Right, there's a lot of folks it is. So, I mean, in the idea of dying from the flu, that's awful because I mean, if you feel bad enough, as it is from a flu that you recover from in a few days, imagine dying from that. That would just be a terrible way to die.
Yeah.
And the whole thing, chuck, comes down to this little tiny virus, that influenza virus, and there's different types and influenza I found actually a shout out to the Italian name for it originally did you know this? Uh? Did not, So I'm going to say it normally, but then you have to say it in your famous Italian accent, Influenza di fredo.
Are you talking about the influenza de fredo?
Yeah, well, which means influence of the cold. Oh, all right, a lot of For many, many, many many years, because the flu is most predominant in the colder months, everybody just assumed that it was the actual cold that was getting you sick, right, That turns out not to be true. It's an actual it's a virus that does seem to favor the cold, drier conditions of the winter months. But this little tiny virus gets into your body and it starts this chain reaction that is just fascinating.
Yeah, so it is a respiratory illness. So, like I said before, when you hear people say the stomach flu, which I've said lot in my life because I get it once a year with the poopy butt and the vomitous mouth and the ill belly.
At the same time. Though I can't I think I've asked you this before, but.
As it literally ever happened at the same time, I think once in my life.
Man, that's rough.
I was on the john with a bucket. That's so rough. Well, the worst time I ever had it. I may have told the story before. I was sick at a friend's house, which is the worst when I was not living in Atlanta, but I was in Atlanta, and I was like, I just got to get to my mom's house. Well, yeah, I was like, I just much more comfortably being sick there, and he was working. It was just one of those things. And so I got in my brother's car that I was borrowing while I was in town.
I don't like where this story's going.
And I drove no lie, probably about one hundred miles an hour to Snellville from Atlanta, thinking, and I pooped in my pants in the car, and I remember thinking, if a cop pulls me over, he would have to be a cold heartless individual to give me a ticket, because I would just say, sir, don't take me to prison, take me to a hospital because I'm dying. Yeah, so I trove one hundred miles an hour. It's kind of fun.
So you made it home. You showed up with poopy pants and your mom took care of you.
Yep, showed up to Diane's house, and I lived. But anyway, that was a long way of setting up this which is that is actually not a flu. The stomach flu is not because the flu is one hundred percent of respiratory illness, right, and is not something that happens in your stomach or in your butt. Right.
And let's let's talk first before we talk about the actual effect of the flu. Let's talk about the virus a little bit. I second, Okay, So back in nineteen thirty one, there was this Iowa farm physician, which is to say he was a human physician of humans, but he probably lived on a farm because it was Iowa in nineteen thirty one. Yeah, his name was Richard schop and he was trying to figure out what this bug that was getting people was. And he investigated with pigs first, because there are plenty of other animals that can come down with the flu, not just humans, right, right, And he finally isolated, isolated a flu virus in swine and it led to this discovery of the isolation of the flu virus in humans too. So right after that they started classifying the flu by strains.
You got A, B, and C, right, So A is the most common and most severe that's the bad news. Yeah, B is a little milder, a little less prevalent. And then we go all the way down to C, which is I get the feeling. CE doesn't happen a lot, and it definitely isn't the one that you're going to have like a big epidemic of the flu from a sea.
Yeah. I couldn't find much on C influenza either orse C. Yeah, it'll make a comeback one day and it'll shock the heck out of all of us. Right, So Type A infects all sorts of different species, right, humans, birds of all kinds, pigs, bats, horses, even.
Yeah, I mean remember the Avian flu that was that scared the world, and that was a right, that was a strain.
B strain is almost exclusively effective of humans. Apparently. The only other species we've ever found a Type B influenza virus in is seals. God knows where they got it from, or if we got it from seals, who knows? Maybe up North, I don't know. And then that C one, it just infects humans and pigs. So you got the three types. And then one other thing about them about the classification of flu strains is that there are also subtypes, right, And so you mentioned like avian flu and the one that scared everybody. I think H five N one, Yeah, that was it.
I remember.
So that H and the N are the they refer to the two kinds of the two main proteins that you find on the outside of a flu virus, hemagglutinin and neurrominiase. Okay, and so depending on those types of H protein or M protein. Uh, that's that's how they subtype flu strains.
Yeah. So, I mean that's a good little factoid. I don't think anyone really understands what those letters mean.
That's what they mean, you know.
Yeah, But as far as you're concerned, just pay attention to the news, and when they talk about the scary ones, they'll mention those letters in numbers, and then you can impress your friends.
Yeah, you can be like, oh, well they're talking about hema glutenant and neurominidase, and they'll.
Say, shut up, nerd, I hope you get sick. So, as far as the standard flu that we're talking about here, the virus, it gets into your body and it kind of makes a b line to your respiratory tract and it binds with your cells. It's viruses. Did we do one a general on viruses?
The one I think we really went in depth on was HIV, where we talked about how virus centers the body takes over. It's just vicious, it is, but it's also it's kind of like admirable in a really deadly efficient way, you know.
It is. So they bind to the surface of the cells in that respiratory tract and then they say, hey, i'd like you to meet my little friend RNA. Why don't Why don't I inject my genetic information into your nucleus and see how you like it? Right?
And when it does that, the cell has been officially hijacked, and the virus uses the cell's own RNA transcription process to create the proteins that are needed to make new versions of the virus. The virus is using this host cell in your respiratory tract to make copies of itself, and suddenly, before the cell knows what's going on, it's made millions of copies of these viruses. Right, And apparently when you talk about it step by step, it seems like this takes a little while, right, No, in seconds. Seconds after that, the virus has entered your respiratory cell. Millions of copies of it have been made.
Yeah, Like this is happening so fast it moves in there, it says I'm in charge.
Now, so out of the way.
Yeah, completely out of the way. I'm running the show. Here. We're copying each other and we're going to move out to the cell membrane because this cell's going to die very quickly, and then that's just going to poof me out into the body further to infect other cells. And it's scary how quickly this happens.
Right, So if you think about it, if that first cell produces millions of viruses, viral copies, and then they're released from the cell out into the rest of the other respiratory cells, and each of those infects another cell, and then those cells all make millions. You see how quickly these viruses reproduce in your body. Yeah, And once that starts to happen, you are infectious. I think once that first cell ruptures, you become infectious. But this can be like a day before symptoms. Right, So this is something people are always saying, like, oh, I'm not infectious anymore, like me I said it earlier too, right, But supposedly the day before you even know you're sick, the day before the first symptoms start, before you start like sniffling a little bit or whatever. Huh, you're infectious, buddy. Yeah, And you're infectious up to seven days after that day you first start showing symptoms with the flu. And if you're a kid, you can be infectious even longer because if kids are anything, they're walking germ factories.
They are just disgusting monsters.
It's hilarious.
It's true. Man, Like, my kid didn't get sick at all for the first eighteen months of her life, and I thought, I've got a wonder baby. Yeah, really, I don't know what's going on. We put her in daycare a couple of days a week, and she was sick NonStop for the next six months.
Man. That is rough.
It is rough. And then they get the family sick, and we'll talk a little bit about that and how that happens. But all this is to say, during flu season, especially if you work in like an office where you know when you hear like the flu's going around or whatever, or anywhere you work, or in school, if you hear about the flu going around, even if you don't feel sick, or your cube mate doesn't feel or look sick. Just start washing your hands a lot.
Oh yeah, that's like they say, that's the best way to prevent getting the flu or spreading the flu is washing your hands a lot.
Do it.
And it's so simple that you almost might discount it, but it's actually true, Like that's the best way to do it. You can wash the flu virus off of your hands with some soap that will buy and the water will wash it right off.
Wash that flu right out of your hair.
Yeah, and if you have the flu, stay home. Yeah, everybody but me stay home.
Well, we're up against it. We had to record a.
Today and also wash your hands just constantly. Like if I'm about to touch anything, I'll wash my hands first. If I'm going to go somewhere outside of the hot zone, which is whatever room I'm sequestered in, you know, I will wash my hands.
You know I appreciate that. I mean, trust me. We're in this tiny studio now, the three of us.
I know, I'm trying not to breathe.
You know, you've done all this on one breath. It's impressive, I know. Well, quickly before we take a break, so you can breathe again. We're going to talk about symptoms afterward. Before you get these symptoms, though, what's happening is your respiratory system is going to become inflamed, and this inflammation might stick around for a few weeks, but from there it moves into your bloodstream, and then that's when you're gonna get these symptoms once it sort of moves into the bloodstream, right, and we're gonna talk about those symptoms as promised, right after this, all.
Right, Chuck, let's bread yeah a little bit, let's talk symptoms. Okay, you know what I need? I need one of those like reads that bugs Bunny used to like hide in the water when Almer Fudd was hunting him.
Uh huh.
I could just like get a long one and maybe a crazy straw would be even better, and just like pipe it out to the air duct right there.
That's a great idea.
What do you think we'll get everybody else sick except you and Jeer.
So the symptoms sound a lot like a cold because the symptoms are kind of the same. A cold is usually not as fraught with potential complications and maybe a little less severe, but they're pretty close which is why you couldn't tell earlier if you had a colder fever or flu.
Right now, but that fever, that's the big one. Apparently, it's a big distinction between the Yeah.
I think that's kind of the way I just distinguish it.
Right, Yeah, And the cold colds are also caused by viruses are caused by coronaviruses, which can there are types of coronaviruses that are really bad that cause like MYRS and SARS. Yeah, but for the most part, when you catch a cold from a coronavirus, it's a low level virus, or it's a rhinovirus. That's the other one that causes the common cold, right, So it's just a different kind of virus producing similar symptoms to a flu.
Do you remember when Peter Sarscard was on Saturday Night Live years ago? He was, you know, the actor. Sure, he was on there during the SARS when there was that t SARS scare in the United States, and one of their skits was he had developed the SARS Guard. SARS Guard just basically a surgical mask. But it was just funny. They said Sarsgard Stars Guard like thirty times and I laughed every time.
I think his younger brothers was Pennywise, the clown in the IT movie.
Right, Oh, I don't know.
I'm pretty sure that was a Sars guard and he is amazing. Yeah have you seen it?
No?
Oh, you got to see it. You're gonna love it.
Now. Was he a Sar's guard or a scars Guard?
Oh? God, I didn't know there were two different things.
Well, there are the scars Guards, which is like Stellin' scarsguard is the dad, okay, and then the son was the dude on True Blood the vampire show, and then recently on that pretty Little Liars I think one with Nicole Kidman, Okay, that's Alexander scars Guard.
I think that might be him. Is sars Guard the one who's in Fire Starza? No, who is that Peter sars Card?
Yeah, that's another dude. What is up with all these guys?
So are you sure you're not just dropping the kof of Peter's scars Guard?
All right, here's the deal. Okay, the guy in Fargo, Man, this is such a bad sidetrack already, it's pretty bad. The guy in Fargo was Peter Stormyre.
Okay, so he's not even in the equation.
Then no, but I definitely know that there is Peter sars Guard okay, because he either was or is married to Maggie Gillenhall.
Oh yeah, I guess I knew that Peter sars Guard.
Okay, and then they're stelling an Alexander scars Guard and I don't know who it the clown was.
It's Bill scars Guard.
And is he related to the scars Guards?
I guess so.
Yeah.
I believe he's the youngest of them.
Okay.
Oh, I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was Tim Curry I was talking about.
No, Actually we didn't know. Looks stuff up. But I didn't look that up because the headline here says Alexander Scarsgard's reaction to his brother Bill's clown costume.
Yeah, it's good his acting, it goes way beyond the costume. They did good with the costume, but it was doing that. Oh yeah, it was good.
I know there were so many people screaming at their phones, but I think we finally got it right.
Yeah, sorry about that everybody. I also want to apologize for any medical students who are being forced to listen to this as part of their class. Hopefully your instructor fast forwarded through that part.
All right, fact this all got started with Stars Guard Stars Guards.
Oh yeah, that's right, because that's from the coronavirus. This is the influenza virus we're talking about that creates this inflammation which is your immune response right in your lungs.
That's correct. And the symptoms like a cold are coughing, sneezing, that the fever which is different, like we said, with the flu, achy body which usually comes with that fever, and then Josh's running nose and congestion that you can hear in your overall lethargy.
Yeah, I am a little under the weather, I guess is a good way to put it. I can tell. So those are just standard flu symptoms. You can have secondary symptoms from complications of the flu. Right. One thing that has long gone hand in hand with the flu as far as like death from flu complications goes is bacterial pneumonia.
Yeah. That's good.
And for a very long time science wasn't quite sure why that why you were just so susceptible to bacterial infections when you were battling the flu, and they figured it out. It's actually your body's immune response that is responsible for it, right, right, So when you have the flu and your body starts to battle it off and you get a fever and your lungs become inflamed, that's that's your immune your immune system's response to the flu virus. But when your body says, okay, calm down, everybody, let's bring the temperature back down, and your body represses its own immune response, it opens the door for bacteria that normally it would be able to fight off, to take advantage of this kind of naturally weakened state that your immune system is in, and you can you're much more susceptible the infections from bacteria, and that's where pneumonia comes from. You can get viral pneumonia, but you usually get bacterial pneumonia. And that's the stuff that people can die from because that bacteria infects your air sex and your lungs, which feel a fluid and puss and blood, and you die from choking on bloody froth that fills up your airway. Yeah, it's a bad jam man.
Severe dehydration is another secondary symptom of the flu. That's why, of course you always want to drink plenty of water when you have a cold or flu.
I look that one up too, Chuck, Because if you think about it, why why would you be dehydrated from the flu. It's from sweating, yeah, sure, your nose running.
Yeah, it's just leaking fluids.
You you are, and like they start to add up and all of a sudden you're dehydrated before you even knew it.
That's right. Ear infections, especially if you're a kid, sinus issues. Emily always gets bad sinus problems along with this stuff.
I know she was starting to get a little Sniffley, is she sick? She did get sick, that poor lady. Yeah, New York Man. Yeah, it killed everyone I love.
And then if you like, in Emily's case, she's slightly asthmatic, But if you are asthmatic, you're like diabetes, it can make that stuff worse.
Yeah, she doesn't have diabetes, right, No, Well, the reason diabetes is comorbid with the flu or is problematic when you have with the flu, is because type one diabetes, especially is an autoimmune disease, So your immune systems already repressed, I guess yeah, And then heart conditions can be exacerbated by it because you're getting less oxygen from your lungs into your bloodstream, which strains the heart. And if it's already weak, people have heart attacks from the flu if they already have a heart condition. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, again, it's a bad jam.
Well, actually, we in the episode coming up about the silly one about the ten Cursed movies. Remember the little girl from Poltergeis died from at twelve from a heart attack brought on by the flu.
Yeah right, yeah, or she had like a stomach blockage. They initially diagnosed it as the flu.
Oh okay, but I thought it was not never like a virus like that.
I don't think so. I think they mistook it all. Well, then forget all that, but people do, so your point still remains correct.
Okay, So how you get the flu? Is this? Like you said, it's generally about November through March. Jane in February tend to be the worst of it here in the United States, And as we mentioned, offices and schools, especially because children are filthy monsters who just don't wash hands, and they breathe on each other and touch each other, and they don't cover their mouths when they call for sneeze.
But it's pretty cute when they hug each other.
It's very cute.
Actually, it's worth it's worth all the sickness in the world.
It's pretty great. But that's the reason that kids tend to spread it more because as much as you try and teach them to cover their mouth when they call and sneeze and wash their hands a lot, it's just not really on their radar like it is for adults.
No, you know, because they are dirty, dirty, dirty creatures.
And then you know, the kid then in turn brings it home and the family gets infected pretty quickly because try as you might, there's just a lot of close contact with kids that you can't avoid. And even if you're washing your hands, they will find a way to infect you.
Right, And if you go even further back, there's an even earlier origin before kids picking it up at daycare or preschool. For the flu, usually it comes from other animals. We were finding, right, Yes, frequently birds, like we were saying, right, And they used to think that for a human to catch a flu from a bird, especially, that flu had to show up in a mixing vessel. Usually a pig which was capable of taking it could be infected by a bird flu and a human flu and flu viruses have this amazing talent called reassortment, where a flu strain and another flu strain can get together and be like, oh, hey, you have eight proteins that make up your RNA. I do too, Let's mix and match and see what happens. And they thought for a long time that this really only took place in pigs and then out would come a new super virus that no one had ever seen before that humans could catch. But from Southeast Asia, people being in close contact with infected birds, especially like in the poultry industry or something, there have been cases that started in the nineties of AVM flu coming directly from birds to humans, so that that theory went out in the window. Yeah, and that's what set off those fears of a bird flu pandemic that we lived with for many years.
Yeah, that's right as far as and you know that a lot of that was just spread from bird poop.
Yeah, and it scared people because that those bird flus are no joke, Like they have like a sixty percent mortality rate sixty percent. Six out of ten people who come down with H five N one bird flu die right. Luckily, it's really really difficult to catch it even when you are around sick birds. It doesn't very frequently make the jump to humans, but it can, is what they what they found.
Yeah, as far as the regular flu, the garden variety flu that we're talking about mainly here, it spreads from well, like we said, from touching stuff, from coughing and sneezing. When you cough and sneeze, even even if you think you're covering your mouth pretty well, there may be little little fluids squirting out between your fingers up to a few feet. It's in the air around you. That stuff can travel, you know. So if that lands on a doorknob, or if someone covers her mouth like a like a normal and then opens a door or borrows a stapler or whatever, it's going to be on that door knob and then you touch it. And that's why like hand washing by the sick and by the non sick is so crucial. Yeah.
And if you're like having an anxious day at work and you're doing your normal thing of chewing on your stapler to relieve anxiety and the guy who borrowed it was sick, your toast.
You are toast. And as you mentioned earlier, bears repeating you can be sick a day before symptoms, and you can or you can be contagious a day before symptoms and still remain contagious up to seven days after the symptoms start. Right, So even if you feel better after day four, you could still be spreading that junk around for a few more days. Right.
And they say that even after you feel better, you should stay in bed an extra day because again, your immune system is compromised and you are are like, you can catch other stuff, so you want to be careful. That extra day really pays.
Off, and that's when you just lay in bed and watch Stranger Things.
Too, Right, I haven't seen it you? Is it good?
Yeah, we just finished it last night.
Cool.
Did you see the first season? Yeah?
Oh yeah, yeah, that was great.
Season two is just as great, if not better.
Wow. I'm glad to say that too.
I was a little nervous, you know, because it was something I loved and it's like, oh man, it's easy too. A lot of pressure.
Well, yeah, that's how it happens. The sophomore season is very frequently like everyone's aware of the success of the show and what people are saying about and they try to adapt to the expectations rather than continuing on doing what they were doing before. But good for you guys. Stranger things.
Yeah so great. I want to get those Duffer brothers on movie Crush.
Oh yeah, it'd be cool.
Those guys'd be great.
Should we take a break, yeah, I think so.
All right, we'll come back and talk a little bit about pandemics, all.
Right, Chuck. So we were talking about how seasonal flu has seasons. That's why it's called seasonal flu. Right, That's that's I guess one classification of flus. There's also a pandemic flu, and the same kind of flu virus can be a pandemic flu or a seasonal flu. And I think usually the way it happens is a new virus will emerge from say like livestock or poultry or something like that and infect humans. And if it's totally novel where no human has ever encountered a flu of this type before, it can just lay waste to people. It can kill a lot of people, It can infect a lot of people that can spread the world. And when that happens, it becomes classified as a pandemic flu. After a couple of rounds around the world, people will have started to develop an immunity to it, but it'll still be passed around. And so for the decade or so, it can be the predominant strain of the flu, but it'll be it'll have changed over to a seasonal type of flu. So it's almost like that the pandemic versus seasonal type flu describes how contagious it is and how virulent it is. I think that's the big distinction.
Yeah, And I think also in a pandemic, doesn't that mean it is left the country?
Yeah, I think that is kind of one of the indicators of it too.
Yeah. Nineteen eighteen, that was These numbers are staggering. This is the worst flu pandemic and world history in nineteen eighteen for I don't know what months exactly, but nineteen eighteen and nineteen and it killed more than twenty million people around the world.
And it killed most of those people actually in four months from September to December.
Isn't that crazy? More lives were lost than all twentyth century wars combined to the flu.
Yeah, you said twenty million, twenty.
Million worldwide, about half a million in the United States.
I saw in many reputable places fifty million people died around the world.
It's just it's staggering.
Yeah, And that was like right at the end of World War One and just came out of nowhere. And one of the other really noteworthy things about it that just baffled people was it was killing like healthy people under the age of like twenty two, twenty three, twenty four, like just healthy young people killed by the flu. A lot of them died from pneumonia. And they finally figured out that it was because it had been about twenty something years since a flu resembling that type of strain had made the rounds, so people under say, like age twenty five had never been exposed to it. So it was a novel flu which just leveled the people it was exposed to had never never encountered something like it before.
Yeah, it's I mean, it's scared to think about. I mean, truly, that couldn't happen today, could it? Or could it?
Oh?
Yeah, yeah, sure, man, you think that we could had something like that off these days?
Do you know, like a of the population of the world was infected with that flu that year? Wow, isn't that crazy?
I know, that's hard to believe.
Yeah, that can totally happen. It's a real concern, all right.
So as far as your risk of getting the flu, if you're a kid, like there's different risk groups like high risk, low risk, whatever, medium or average risk. But if you're under two years old, your little immune system isn't quite smart enough yet to know how to fight things off, so you're definitely more at risk. And as always, what affects the children also affect the elderly. So if you're over sixty five seniors is elderly wrong to say, I think elderly?
Technically eighty one? Oh?
Really? Yeah, all right, so we'll go with seniors.
Seniors, active senior adults who have decades left ahead of them, that's right.
Who else, anyone who has any kind of chronic like I mentioned asthma or diabetes, any kind of chronic condition, if you're pregnant, if you work in a hospital or a doctor's office or nursing home.
Nursing home is not just people who work there, but the residents too are in a really vulnerable position. Because they are in the elderly age range, their immune systems are pretty compromised. If they're in a nursing home, they're probably ill already and then they're living in close quarters with other people who are ill. That's a that's a recipe for a disaster.
Yeah, sure is. It's also a recipe for tapioca pudding. It is the best around remedy wise. And we'll talk about vaccinations here in a minute, because I thought that was kind of one of the most interesting parts of this. But as far as remedies, if you get the flu, it's a it's a virus. So you can't take anti biotics. No, you can't take a pill that's going to cure you. There are some anti viral drugs, which I've never tried any of these of you.
No, no, no.
I tried zycamlast year once. I think that's for colds.
Yeah, I thought that was like discredited.
Well, I mean I had a few people say, oh, you know, you try as I can. It helps not cut your cold faster.
Uh.
It killed my sense of taste and smell. Oh no, for several days, to the point where I was scared.
I don't remember that. I'll bet you were scared.
Yeah, And I looked it up and it's a thing.
Oh I do remember that actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's just really unnerving. The idea of maybe it's permanent.
Yeah it was. It was pretty pretty freaky, yeah, I'll bet, and super noticeable. It wasn't like a subtle thing.
You'd be like chilling, I miss you.
So that was my experience. I'm not making some sweeping statement about that medication.
Way to see amen.
But there are antiviral drugs called there's one called tama flu relenza flumidine a little on the nose if you ask.
Me flu stop, Well, any viral they seem like a good idea, But they seem like a good idea under the premise that seasonal flu strains were used to think. They used to think that they died out at the end of a season. Right, Well, they started tracking them, like our global monitoring system is really top notch and they can track flu around the world, and they've found that seasonal flu at the end of the season in North America, it just goes to South America. So since since that's the case, when you use anti virals and you're exposing these flus that go on to survive, you're also training them evolutionarily speaking, to adapt so that those antiviral drugs are useless against them. For people who really need them. So, just like with antibiotics, using anti virals just to cure a common flu or to shorten a common flu is probably a bad idea when you're talking about the whole population.
Yeah, and that's what they do. They they what they try to do is just keep the red cellular spread from happening as much as it can. Right, And that's sort of the easiest way to say it.
Yeah. Yeah, there's there's one keeps them well to a pair of them, keep them from replicating, and then another one traps them inside to sell. Once they enter, it's like, oh God, I can't get out, the door is locked, and then death.
And they're all prescription drugs, right, if I'm not mistaken.
So vaccines are like pretty hot. They're like the hot thing to do on a Friday night is to go get a flu vaccine, right.
Yeah, I didn't get I didn't get flu shots for many, many, many many years until I had a kid.
Yeah. And they say like if you especially if you have a baby under six months of age, they can't be vaccinated and so everyone around them should be vaccinated, is the recommended recommendation from the CDC.
Yeah, like our close family, the grain and the abbas all and the pop pops and the papas and the poupas and the memangs and the momos. Yeah, yeah, Momo got a flu shot.
That was nice of her. She's very kind.
So yeah, we all got flu shots. And I just wasn't you know, I never got the flu much. I'd never I didn't have a disbelief in the flu vaccine. I was just like, yeah, I don't really need to bother with that.
Yeah, that's kind of it was fine. Do you get them now though? Is it a habit of yours now?
Well? Yeah, now, just they just sort of recommend it. When you have kids up up until they're a certain age, you should get vaccinated as a family.
Right, And when you have kids, if you get them vaccinated, you once they're able to be vaccinated again under six months, they say, no, no, no, don't do that. When they're young though, and you're getting them vaccinated, they need to be vaccinated twice, like a month apart. Yes, And so with flu vaccines in general, they recommend that you get it as early in the season is possible because it takes about two weeks for that to take effect. So with a kid, then I guess you would want to get them, so that six weeks before the flu season, I don't know, or there is that second one pretty much like, okay, now it's taking effect. So is that four weeks plus two weeks or just.
I don't remember the schedule. Yeah, I don't remember the schedule.
Well, ask your doctor. Okay, we're not doctors. Stop pressure.
They'll tell you, like when you go to get your little kiddy checkups, they say, you know, come back in this month and get your flu shot number one and then flu shot number two.
And so for a while there they there were two kinds of flu shots that the CDC recommended. One was an actual shot, the flu vaccine that was in a shot form, yes, and then there was another one that's called live attenuated influenza virus, which came in the form of a nasal spray, and that was usually recommended for kids. I don't know if it's because kids still like needles or what, but the CDC is officially stopped recommending nasal flu vaccines. Yeah, don't do those right.
Well, And when they were doing it, when we say kids, you had to be over five because it was a like you said, a live a live virus.
Right, it was a live, weakened virus.
Yeah, And that's different. Like if you think, all right, I'm gonna get a flu shot, so that means I'm going to get the flu virus shot into me, and so I might feel like I have the flu. That's not really the case. It's it's really kind of neat how they do it. These these scientists and doctors, like you said, track what's going on in the world of flu all over the world, and they they sort of make up normal. They don't sort of. They very definitely make a prediction and say, here's the flu strain specific to the United States. Let's say that I think we're going to be faced with this year, and they make their best side scientific guests possible, and that is, you get a not live version of that virus injected into your body. Your body sees, hey, foreign invaders here, let me produce antibodies. Then if that virus or if the real flu knocks on your door later that winter, your body says, wait, I've met you before, I know how to fight you.
Yeah, but it's pretty cool.
And it literally the effectiveness. I looked up this year and it's a year to year thing. It's forty to sixty percent on this year's strain, and it varies because it really just depends on how well those scientists have predicted how much they get it.
Right right, because if they get all three wrong, well then you're toast when you encounter the flu that's going around that season's right, it's introducing. But even when they do get it right, it's kind of baffling that sometimes the flu vaccine just doesn't bestow any kind of immunity. Yeah, apparently Australia just came out out of a really bad epidemic flu season down there, and what didn't cause a lot of deaths, but everybody was sick with the flu. It was an H three type flu that went around. And even though that strain showed up in the vaccine that was given out, only like fifteen percent of people who got vaccinated and were exposed to the flu were immune to it. Like eighty five percent of people who got flu vaccines and then encountered the flu still got sick. That's a pretty bad track record for a flu vaccine, and they're they're just not sure why. And one of the theories is so when they make flu vaccines they grow them in egg protein typically like hats eggs. That's the medium they use actually grow the viruses that they then kill. One researcher pointed out that at least one kind of flu virus mutates in the presence of egg protein, so that the virus that you put in to grow in there is different from the one that comes out. It's a mutated version, and so maybe that would would prevent your body from recognizing the original one that you were trying to introduce it to in the vaccine. So interesting, it is pretty interesting.
Well, and they say there's a list of people who should not receive the flu shot, and one of the one of those qualifications is if you are allergic to chicken eggs, then you shouldn't get a flu shot.
Yeah, there's like a couple of other ways that they make flu shots flu vaccines, but that chicken egg is the most predominant way to do it.
Yeah, if you're currently have a fever weight on your flu shot under six months, of course, we said you cannot if you have had flu shots in the past and you had a bad reaction, because like I said, it's not going to make you sick, but you might feel a little achy or have sore muscles or something, but you can't have a bad reaction. And if that's the case, then maybe flu shots aren't for you, right.
And if you're an anti vaxxer, then you probably are decided that flu shots aren't for you, correct, which we will never do an episode on that.
On vaccinations, right. Oh, you don't think.
So, I don't know, man. So the idea that a flu vaccine can, you know, check all the boxes but still just be wrong, wrong, wrong, or not confer immunity has some people looking for a universal vaccine or one that lasts way longer than just a year. What they're targeting is, so when you get a normal vaccine, that vaccine is based on that HA protein, the hema gluten. Yeah, and that's the most quickly evolving part of any flu virus. Right. So they're saying, well, let's look at other parts of the flu virus that don't evolve nearly as quickly and target that. And some of those parts are even basically universal among all flu viruses. So if you can find if you can create a vaccine based on a stable part of a flu virus that's a part of every flu virus. One vaccine could confer ideally lifelong immunity from all influenza for anybody who takes the vaccine.
One vaccine to cure them all exactly. Wow.
Yeah, so you got anything else?
No? I mean, I guess we're not going to cover the boogie Wigi Flu.
I thought that was boogie woogy fever.
No, it's the rock and pneumonia the boogie wigy flu.
Oh that's nice. What's that from? Is that an Atlanta Rhythm Section song?
No, they're better than that.
Okay, Uh, well, since I said Atlanta Rhythm Section everybody, that means it's time for a listener mail.
Uh. Yeah. This is a Simpson's Overlooked overlook Simpsons bet from us. And this is not one of those We got plenty of things where people like, hell, could you not have mentioned this quote or this episode? But the response was good. Then people weren't necessarily poopooing it.
No. And also I want to say thank you to everybody who wrote in to just say congratulations or to thank us. That was all. Every single one of those emails or tweets or posts were all well received. So thanks for those guys.
Totally, But this is something we failed to mention, which definitely deserves its own email. And this is from rich our Man on Cape cod As. He says, Hey, guys, was listening to The Simpsons two parter. Enjoyed it very much. You explained how an episode came to be, from conception to animation, etc. And you paid respect to each portion. But then you slide it off one of the most important men in the franchise, you just said, and then they slapped Danny Elfman's score on it and it's done well. Is any true Simpsons officionado would know? Danny Elfman has never once written a score to The Simpsons. He wrote, as we know, just the title or the theme song. So he says that job fell to the immensely talented and recently terminated via email, Alf Clawson. For twenty seven years, every score, every queue, every song was composed, orchestrated and conducted by Clawson and his live orchestra. He's won two Emmys and seven Annie Awards for his work. The reason this is such a painful sight it was because this omission has been happening for years. Clawson has worked insane hours writing music for a live orchestra to accompany an animated show. He's always played second fiddle. Nailed it, he said to all those who think Elfman is any part of the show, after he pinned the main title. In fact, the main title theme song We All Know and Love is actually Clawson's re orchestration of Elfman's theme that took place mid season three with a lusher, more crisp orchestration. Wow, I bet you anything, Rich plays the obo.
Alf Clawson. I'm so sorry.
I know, he said. I myer your podcast for being light to information that has been stuck lurking in the shadows. You always make sure a credit is given to those who sometimes went their entire lives without getting the nod they deserve.
Well, this guy's really turning the knife in our back, saysn't he.
And I feel you, oh Clawson, that respect. So Alf clawsan for real. And then it was a bit of a longer email. He told the story of how he was recently fired by email, which is not cool.
No, it's definitely not Yeah. So twenty seven years yeah, of dedicated work.
No man, not cool, guys, So that is a rich our Man on Cape cod.
Well, thanks a lot, Rich appreciate that that was one of the better emails I've heard in a while.
I agreed.
If you want to try and top Rich, let's see what you got. You send us an email, stuff podcast at houstuffworks dot com and join us at our home on the web. Stuff you Should Know dot Com.
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