Hi everyone. I’m Dr. Brian Evans, the chief medical officer here at Tahoe Forest Health System. And we’re talking today about influenza, which you know, it really never goes away completely, but every winter we start to really think much more about influenza. It makes its rounds. Most of the time influenza is what we consider to be pretty mild. And so sometimes we get, you know, lulled into a little bit of a false sense of complacency. Unfortunately, influenza can actually be quite serious in some individuals and people die of influenza every single year. It’s particularly worrisome in the very young, the very old and people with comorbid conditions like lung disease, COPD, emphyzema or heart disease or diabetes. Significant medical problems that put them at higher risk of the influenza infection actually just getting much worse. The best approach to really protect yourself is with vaccination.
Each year we get new updated vaccinations that protect us against influenza. You cannot expect the influenza vaccine to necessarily prevent all cases of infection in all patients, but you can expect that it’ll generally make a infection from influenza more mild and less likely to end up with complications such as pneumonia and certainly make it less likely to die from influenza. It also makes it less likely to give influenza infections to other members of the community. So that can be very important in protecting the more vulnerable in our community.
You know, I would recommend that you take precautions in other ways beyond vaccination. Certainly washing your hands, making sure that you do that when you’ve been out in public. Try to not touch your face if you’ve, you know, been touching other things with your hands. If you cough, make sure you cover that cough. And if you’re sick, stay home if you possibly can. Watch out for warning signs from influenza which could signal that things are getting worse such as shortness of breath, chest pain, very high fevers, certainly mental status changes like confusion. Those kinds of things would make us very concerned and those those patients need to get checked out by us in the emergency department quickly.
Flu does peak in the winter. You can see it early fall and you can actually see it uh kind of getting into spring as well, but winter is the time we really see a lot of influenza cases. So protect yourself, protect your family with a flu shot every year. Take the daily precautions we talked about and look out for the warning signs. We’re here if you need us. Stay safe out there.
