Sidetracked Charley

For those of you that follow my other blog(s) you know I got the flu. Probably, my nurse sister thinks, not the Swine flu but there is another flu virus out there making the rounds that is not covered by the flu vaccine manufactured for this flu season which came late. And if remarks on Twitter are any indication it reached epidemic proportions before Swine flu did. As I blogged and commented in various platforms that I had the flu I was constantly told I should have gotten the flu shots. I had a flu shot once and it almost killed me as it is cultured in eggs and intensifies the sulfur of the egg yokes. I am allergic to that. I have always had doubts about the vaccine process. Probably because in my life it is not just the flu vaccines I have reactions to but the oral polio vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, the original shots for polio, and a couple others. To take me for vaccinations as a child was to figure out what days of school I could most miss - like up to a week. But I also think ...

I was reading up on the growing threat of Swine Flu this morning. I do not live in a major city and with my lifestyle (artist in own studio) I can avoid a lot of the risk centers. But I do live in a border state with Mexico and between the drug traffic and illegals crossing (not to mention tourist traffic) I cannot be totally sure of safety from the feared pandemic. This morning's news was, however, particularly interesting in that I evidently survived a previous pandemic in 1968. From Yahoo News : While all the deaths so far have been in Mexico, the flu is spreading in the United States. Eleven cases were confirmed in California, Kansas and Texas, and eight schoolchildren in New York City caught a type A influenza virus that health officials say is likely to be the swine flu. The new flu strain, a mixture of various swine, bird and human viruses, poses the biggest risk of a large-scale pandemic since avian flu surfaced in 1997, killing several hundred people. A...