Flu shot, or not?

[smurfalicious]

Not.

My friend's son, Danny, gets the flu. Only the flu doesn't affect him in the usual fashion. Instead of getting ill, he gets a slight fever and then... his legs stop working. He begins to lose feeling in his legs but simultaneously experiences severe pain deep in the muscles of his legs. Then his legs stop working altogether and he's an invalid. The virus, for whatever reason, attacks the muscles in his legs. Last Thursday he was hospitalized for the FIFTH time for this very thing. This time, they caught it early, and instead of the usual 2-week hospital stay, he was in for less than a week.

One of the questions asked of the physicians was whether or not he would benefit from having an annual flu shot. The doctors were all in agreement that he would not. The flu has so many different strains that mutate so rapidly that by the time they have obtained strains of the virus, replicated it in the lab, tested, manufactured, and distributed it, it has already mutated within the population so many times, that the shot itself is probably only effective against less than 50% of the existing strains running rampant.

Even as susceptible as he is to the virus, it probably wouldn't do any good to protect him when he's currently in school, and we all know schools are little super germ factories anyway. Basically, unless your immune system is somehow compromised (by age, disease, etc.), you're better off not getting a shot that likely will not protect you from the virus most of the time anyway. And most people get sick from the shot right after they get it.