The CDC website posts information for each of the last 14 flu seasons on the effectiveness of each year’s flu vaccine.  Averaged out, the effectiveness of flu vaccines is 40.5%. Figure. Effectiveness of Seasonal Flu Vaccines from the 2004-2018 Flu Seasons While that may not sound too bad, it means that 60% or 3 out of every…

State medical boards license doctors.  They also enforce standards of practice.  For example, medical boards took away the licenses of over 50 doctors who treated chronic Lyme disease, and investigated many more.  Frustrated Lyme patients, unable to find doctors to treat them, went to their state legislatures to fight back.  As a result, every state…

It is only one study.  But it was carefully done, used interesting methods, and it tried to explore issues that have rarely been studied.  Researchers from the University of Maryland studied students who had new symptoms of influenza to see if infectious flu virus spread during coughs, sneezing, or regular breathing.  They looked at nasal…

Probably the best data on the severity of yearly influenza epidemics comes from deaths in children, because there is mandatory reporting of each death as related to influenza.  Flu-related deaths in adults are reported as due to flu (very few), pneumonia (more) or underlying chronic medical illnesses that contributed to death during or after a…