The specialists in this banally dreadful disease are alarmed as they do every year. The epidemic is affecting Île-de-France, raising fears of the peak of the epidemic for the Christmas holidays, raising fears of overwhelmed emergency services. A disease that everyone thinks they know and especially thinks that it affects only the elderly … Hence the confusion when it occurs in healthy people and the explanation for the relative failure of vaccination.
Vaccination does not protect against the flu… and this is what many opponents of vaccination are playing on. Certainly ! But the vaccination explains why those who get the flu will have a less severe form. And this is important because we will only know in a few days the severity of the 2017-2018 vintage, depending on the number and progression of serious cases admitted to intensive care.
There is still time to get vaccinated, although the epidemic is here. Vaccinated or not, the first step is… to try to avoid being reached! The usual measures also work for everyone.
Protect yourself from the virus
Regardless of the strain of influenza virus in circulation, transmission always follows the same process: an infected person projects droplets of saliva into the air, while talking, coughing or sneezing: hence the interest of “barrier gestures”: washing hands, and less known: ventilating rooms because millions of viruses are then found in the air, before being inhaled by other people who will be contaminated in turn, and so right now. In other words, if you are elderly and there is a lot of flu in your area, go out as little as possible!
The flu makes you sick
Once reached, it is first brutal. The body temperature rises very quickly above 39 °. And above all, we are hurting, our heads are like a gas meter. Those who have had the real flu, it is certain, get vaccinated the following year.
You must then go to bed; drink a lot: this is the most important thing. And take a paracetamol tablet and a small vitamin C… While waiting for the doctor who will know very quickly if it is a real flu and will be able to prescribe specific drugs for the disease.
If the flu doesn’t get complicated, it’s an all-inclusive week, with two or three days when you’re really not well.
Let us repeat that there are people who need to protect themselves even more than others: elderly people, and those who have a significant chronic disease: asthma, heart disease or who are undergoing heavy treatment such as chemotherapy. But we can assume that all these people are vaccinated since the vaccination is free …
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