There are two types of flu vaccines: the injection and the nasal spray. Injectable flu vaccines usually contain inactivated strains of types A and B flu virus and help your body to provide immunity to these two common strains of the flu. The nasal spray vaccine contains a live, but weakened version of the same strains ? but its use isn't currently recommended [2]. Any immunity from these vaccin...

There are two types of flu vaccines: the injection and the nasal spray. Injectable flu vaccines usually contain inactivated strains of types A and B flu virus and help your body to provide immunity to these two common strains of the flu. The nasal spray vaccine contains a live, but weakened version of the same strains ? but its use isn't currently recommended [2]. Any immunity from these vaccin...

Many national organizations call for medical students to receive more public health education in medical school. Nonetheless, limited evidence exists about successful servicelearning programs that administer preventive health services in nonclinical settings. The Flu Crew program, started in 2001 at the Stanford University School of Medicine, provides preclinical medical students with opportuni...

Social media is producing massive amounts of data at an unprecedented scale, where people share their experiences and opinions on a variety of different things, including healthcare-related topics, like health conditions, their symptoms, treatments, side-effects, and so on. This makes the publicly available social media data an invaluable resource for mining such data to discover interesting an...

This article examines flu vaccination beliefs and practices produced during a survey of undergraduate students in Spring 2012 (IRB#10-732). This research uses the methods of rhetorical analysis - or the study of persuasive features and arguments used in language - to examine statements respondents made regarding flu and flu vaccine. In these responses, students generated unique categories of ar...

BACKGROUND Influenza A (flu) virus causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide, and current vaccines require annual updating to protect against the rapidly arising antigenic variations due to antigenic shift and drift. In fact, current subunit or split flu vaccines rely exclusively on antibody responses for protection and do not induce cytotoxic T (Tc) cell responses, which are broadly...

The general population is concerned about the probable devastating effects of pandemic H1N1 2009. Based upon the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, scientific publications and theories, the idea that swine flu parties may achieve passive immunity against pandemic H1N1 2009 has been proposed. Public health officials have asked the general public not to resort to these parties. However, no concrete evide...

Sixty patients meeting Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria for generalized social phobia were assigned to cognitive therapy (CT), fluoxetine plus self-exposure (FLU + SE), or placebo plus self-exposure (PLA + SE). At posttreatment (16 weeks), the medication blind was broken. CT and FLU + SE patients then entered a 3-mo...

BACKGROUND The Google Flu Trends service was launched in 2008 to track changes in the volume of online search queries related to flu-like symptoms. Over the last few years, the trend data produced by this service has shown a consistent relationship with the actual number of flu reports collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), often identifying increases in flu cases...