Flu Treatment.. (Read 579 times)

I deserve little if any respect. Or so my wife and kids say. But I have had to deal with these issues, erm, from time to time. This is a good source of info, BTW: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/

Does that mean I have to stay away from the internet too? Good God, what has it all come to.

Oh no. If you are stuck at home, you are required to double your internet time

There is no science to back this up...at least none that I know.

So the flu is officially in my house now. My youngest (23 mo) just got tested. I highly suspect that my 8 y.o. also has it since she's had a fever for many days now even though she says she feels fine. All the kiddos got the flu shot. My wife and I did not get the flu shot. The baby has been been pretty much in our bed the last 3 nights as she has not been sleeping much. Often she has been laying on top of me, blowing snot bubbles at me, or generally oozing from her nose, mouth and eyes. I've basically taken a bath in flu virus for the last 3 nights, have slept very little, and have been running 70 mpw. It it pretty much inevitable I'm going to get run over by this thing?

Our family dr. just told us the very same thing, he said not to treat anything under 100.3. Not sure where he came up with that precise number.

If I remember my immunology correctly I think the reason is something like this: infectious viruses and bacteria (pathogens) will typically thrive inside your body at it's normal temperature, 98.6. But these little buggars, although nasty, will often die off or fail to replicate if the temperature is raised. So, your body's immune response it to raise its temperature to make it less hospitable for the virus or bacteria. That's the theory anyway. So some doctors think it's better to let the fever burn off the bad guys as long as the fever is low enough to tolerate. I do know from lab work I did as an undergrad that bacteria can grow like crazy at 38 C but raise the temp to 39 C and they stop growing completely. Viruses on the other hand are trickier since they can't self replicate.

Strep and Flu tend to cause fairly high fevers.

My worst fevers have been secondary to strep infections. Those are horrible. I doubt that I have ever had true influenza. It's sort of a very misused generic term that people throw around to indicate they are sick, when they most likely have a cold.

That's not necessarily true. We work with a lot of bacteria at 37C because it is body temperature and we want to see what the bugs are doing at the same temperature they would experience during an infection. Alot of pathogens can grow happily up to 42C. Some (but not most) can grow pretty well at room temperature (25to30C). I'm a bacteriologist though so I don't know anything about viruses or immune system I thought the fever was at least partially a side effect of the immune response rather than an actual defense mechanism.

You're correct. I didn't mean to suggest that was universally true. I just remember growing some E.Coli that thrived at 37 growing on 4-flouro tryptophan which should have been toxic (I initially wrote 38 incorrecty. It's been a few years). But the same stuff died at 38 or 39. We were doing forced evolution of bacterial species which was pretty interesting stuff. In the case of our E. Coli that grew on the toxic substrate we later sequenced it to search for adaptive mutations.

Have fun! And maybe call your doc and ask for Tamiflu NOW.

So that's a yes? It's inevitable? I'm not going down without a fight.