Tamiflu’s not much help and there won’t be a vaccine for months; the only hope is mouthfuls of vitamins.The best that can be said of Tamiflu is that it will reduce the duration of flu by a day or two; the worst is that it may cause confusion, self-injury and death. Vaccine production is a catch-up game, and it will take another four months to produce one, by which time the virus may have mutated into something else. Nutrition serves both the vulnerable and the well; vigorous supplementation can prevent or moderate the impact of viruses. The consequence of an overdose is only expensive urine; the risk of deficiency is vulnerability to infection and other disease. Vitamins A, C, D and B12, and Zinc all have documented benefit against infections; if you really fear Swine flu take loads of them, and don’t worry if your urine is pink or yellow due to overflow. It’s cheap, available and effective, unlike Tamiflu and flu vaccine. We have a SPECIAL OFFER ON PREVENTION OF SWINE FLULink to our SPECIAL OFFER |
OR read on…WHO have just confirmed that it will be November before a vaccine is available. It may now be true that this H1N1 strain is more virulent than it seemed when it first reached the UK; but this does not alter my advice, which is: On TamifluThat on average it reduces the duration of flu symptoms by 1 to 1½ days, but at the cost of common gut side-effects (nausea, stomach-ache, vomiting) and uncommon more serious ones, from brain-fog (“I couldn’t think past a comma”, one patient told me) to the strange desire to harm yourself. This is according to the official Tamiflu website [1,2].
On vaccinationThat even when it becomes available, all the evidence suggests that it won’t save many lives. A 2005 study “could not correlate increasing vaccination coverage after 1980 with declining mortality rates in any age group” [3]. That’s flu vaccine in general; this one hasn’t been made yet, so we have no idea how good it will be, but there’s no reason to think it will be much better than the rest. On nutrition, though; Vitamin D In 2008 a brilliant study by leading vitamin D researchers [4] proposed that one reason vaccines don’t work better was widespread vitamin D deficiency due to lack of sunlight; Over the last 20 years, why has influenza mortality in the aged not declined with increasing vaccination rates? Given that influenza vaccines effectively improve adaptive immunity, the most likely explanation is that the innate immunity of the aged declined over the last 20 years due to medical and governmental warnings to avoid the sun. While the young usually ignore such advice, the elderly often follow it. |