Americans are scared of the flu. When they see headlines like this: “A mother got the flu from her children – and was dead two days later,” who can blame them? Then they see stats from the CDC that say twice as many people have had the flu at this point in the year than had it last year. It’s scary. But is the fear warranted?
The CDC says that doctors have diagnosed over 6,000 people with the flu virus this year. That was in December. I assume the number has gone up since then. But here’s the problem. Just because a doctor says you have the flu doesn’t mean you have the flu. Just ask Dr. Peter Doshi. He wrote a piece in the online British Medical Journal that destroys the media’s flu panic.
Dr. Doshi states in his article that researchers take hundreds of thousands of respiratory samples from flu patients in the US every year. They take these samples and test them in their labs. What they consistently find is that the vast majority of these sample have zero flu virus in them. You read that right. Only a small percentage of the samples contain any trace of the flu virus.
And yet doctors still diagnose the flu just because the patient has a few symptoms that resemble the symptoms of the flu. But they don’t have the flu!
Dr. Doshi’s BMJ article is entitled “Influenza: marketing vaccines by marketing disease.” He writes: “Even the ideal influenza vaccine, matched perfectly to circulating strains of wild influenza and capable of stopping all influenza viruses, can only deal with a small part of the ‘flu’ problem because most ‘flu’ appears to have nothing to do with influenza. Every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory specimens are tested across the US. Of those tested, on average, 16% are found to be influenza positive.”
Only 16% of the flu cases are actually flu cases. That means the flu epidemic you’re hearing about so fervently in the media isn’t really an epidemic of the flu. Sure, it’s an epidemic of sickness. But not the flu.
The media is perpetuating a lie. Even the mother who died two days after getting sick didn’t die from the flu. She died from pneumonia. But the article doesn’t tell you that until halfway through. What’s more, the author of the article states: “For people suddenly stressed out about a sudden high temperature or dry cough, there is an easy and inexpensive way to prevent influenza: annual vaccinations.”
That’s what every article about the flu “epidemic” will tell you – get a vaccine. But the CDC admits that only 10% of the flu shots actually work. That’s even lower than the number Dr. Doshi put forth. So the reason flu shots don’t work is because we simply don’t have a flu problem. Dr. Doshi writes: “It’s no wonder so many people feel that ‘flu shots’ don’t work: for most flus, they can’t.”
They can’t work because we don’t have a flu problem. We have a “compromised immune system problem.” People get sick mainly because their immune system can’t fight off the bug effectively. If you want to avoid the flu or any other sickness this winter, you have to boost your immune system so it can fight the bugs. And the best way to do that is to eat a healthful diet that’s full of veggies and fruits. Then take extra nutrients in supplement form.
I’ve told you in the past that the two best nutrients to stay healthy in winter are vitamin D and EpiCor. There are other nutrients that can help too, such as elderberry, turmeric, and resveratrol. Just make sure you’re taking nutrients that will keep your immune system strong. That’s the best way to avoid most of the scary bugs that are out there.
References:
BMJ 2013; 346:f3037
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/12/07/a-mother-got-the-flu-from-her-children-and-was-dead-two-days-later/?utm_term=.8853b1ec1d2a