Swine Flu - Seriously?

by Dr. Tiffany Schafer

Swine Flu, Seriously? What’s next?

A few years ago we had the Avian or Bird Flu scare, now it’s the pigs? Seriously, what’s going on here? Well, what the larger health organizations and biased news media are not telling you is that these flu’s are around and infecting many people every year. So the next logical question is why is Swine flu a big deal this year? Well, aside from the political and economic conspiracy theories circulating, we need to touch on Swine flu history in the US, what the current scare is, and why vaccines don’t fit into the equation for the majority of the population.

Here goes. Swine flu, aka Spanish Flu was a large problem in the early 1900’s. The current flu is similar to the 1900’s outbreak strain, but it is not the same. In approximately 1918-1920, a very large percentage of the world was infected and millions died from the virus. In this pandemic, normal healthy individuals were becoming infected and dying. Currently, with today’s strain, only the immune suppressed, babies, and elderly are dying. An example of immune suppressed would be people south of the border where sanitation and food preparation are not what they are north of the border. Improper sanitation makes the immune system work harder giving viruses a better chance to infect and do their damage. Babies don’t have fully functioning immune systems and elderly immune systems start to decline as a part of aging. What everyone is not making clear is the current scare. It’s not that swine flu is infecting again; it does every year. The difference is that the healthcare community is expecting a mutation that will be harmful for normal healthy individuals, or the majority of the population.

The common cold mutates so often and so fast that we aren’t able to create a vaccine for it because a vaccine is specific to one strain, not every strain or variation in one season. Think of writing a story. You’re going to read back over it and proof-read it making punctuation and grammatical changes. The story is the same, just a newer, better draft. This is like the minor mutations viruses make. Same theme but different enough our bodies have to go through the immune reaction again. Imagine one day you wake up and the story you once wrote doesn’t appeal to you anymore. Just like in the movies, you wad it up and shoot for two in your office waste basket then write the story completely over. It’s the same story but told completely different. This is a larger, more dangerous mutation of a virus, more dangerous because the gap between the mutations is more than our immune systems can adapt to.

Let’s touch on the vaccine topic. What they aren’t telling you with the vaccines is that for the general population (the normal and healthy group), any mutation renders the vaccine useless. The healthcare community is expecting a mutation by the end of the summer. The hope is the new mutation will be similar enough to the current strain and a new vaccine will be easily modified, but if that is the case, the normal and healthy population will survive the mutation without the vaccine anyways.
The best thing to do is to take care of yourself. Hydrate properly, eat a healthier diet, and take a good quality, well rounded vitamin. Exercise and chiropractic adjustments increase the number of immune cells in the body. It’s like creating more soldiers verses sending the exhausted ones to the line. You can also get good information on diet, supplements, vitamins, and mineral recommendations to increase your immunity and all around health from your family chiropractor or naturaphathic doctors.