We need to really stop using the terms "the flu" & "flu like symptoms". One of the things that led to COVID being minimised early on was medical experts liking it to "the flu", meaning influenza. Which unfortunately most people read as "that cold and fever I had for 3 days in January that I called the flu, but probably wasn't actually influenza". Influenza is a deadly disease that kills people every year. It's really nasty. Yet so many of the infections people call "the flu" aren't influenza
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@quixoticgeek my rule for checking if someone had flu is "imagine you're in bed and someone put £100 under your door mat, and you can keep it if you go get it. do you?"
if they cannot envision getting up to go get it, that's flu. otherwise probably not.
I barely even remember having flu when I was a kid - the fever cooked my brain so hard I lost almost all memory of it. it was brutal. mum took me to the hospital with a temp over 41°C and all I can recall is a few blurry seconds of the ceiling.
@quixoticgeek doctor here. Yes. Just having that colloquial use out there makes it more difficult to understand what doctors are saying.
@quixoticgeek I last had the flu in 2016.
I've got the vaccine every single year since then. (Paid privately, but worth it).
@quixoticgeek Just as you say, even the flu isn't "just the flu." People never should have been allowed to say that.
People also need to realize the Flu is also dangerous! To date i know:
10 yr old developed type 1 diabetes after getting the flu.
30 yr old contracted type 1 diabetes after contracting the flu.
50 yr old deaf in one ear after contracting the flu.
And this is off the top of my head.
We live in a country of morons.
Good point. Maybe “my immune system is suddenly reacting to something.”
@JMMaok @quixoticgeek 'respiratory symptoms and general malaise' will do fine for what most people mean when they say 'flu'.
@quixoticgeek @JMMaok True. Also we have a perfectly good term - 'A cold'.
Though I expect for many people that implies 'not actually sick, certainly not bad enough to stay home'. (Which should not be the case even for mild symptoms, as we now know, but before 2020 it did work like that in my mind, and it still does for many. Even during some bits of the pandemic, when you were *supposed* to stay home when sick, I have had to exaggerate my child's symptoms to be allowed to keep them home with a cold.)
So I guess a different short and catchy term for 'sickness with respiratory symptoms' is in fact needed.
Good point. Maybe “my immune system is suddenly reacting to something.”
@quixoticgeek @dalias "kills" is quick and simple. I got type 1 diabetes thanks to flu - in previous millennium.
Because "the flu" has been downgraded so much, people don't take it seriously. So while experts are prepping for a bird flu epidemic that can become a pandemic, people aren't concerned. Cos they think it'll be like that 3 day cold they had. Now that low cost lateral flow tests are available that can test for actual influenza, we really need to make it so that "the flu" only covers an actual influenza infection. And then find another term for the bad cold.
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@quixoticgeek I heard an interesting thing about the bird flu.
Our way of dealing with infections is fever, because most pathogens are more sensitive to high temperatures than we are.
Bird flu can survive higher temperature than our brain can.
And we really need to do something about "flu like symptoms". Have you ever looked up the list of diseases that have "flu like symptoms" at one stage or another it covers diseases ranging from a common cold upto COVID, ebola, hantaviruses, and all sorts of other nasty shit. It's an entirely unhelpful term. The unspecific nature of the term, coupled with how much "the flu" is misused, literally kills people. Before the next pandemic. We need to fix the way we talk about illnesses.
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@quixoticgeek Calling a common cold "the flu" is like calling every kind of headache a "migraine". Which is something people do, of course. 🙄
And this doesn't help much:
"Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold[.]"
And on top of that, symptoms of the common cold may be very similar to the flu, and can lead to pneumonia and death, just like influenza.
@quixoticgeek Such a key point about the "unspecific nature of the term". We hear the same hand-wavy, anti-informative mechanism at play with the term "common sense".
![Mre. Dartigen [renovator mode]](https://mediacdn.aus.social/accounts/avatars/108/195/770/473/016/150/original/d5b937db377b2251.gif "Mre. Dartigen [renovator mode]")
@quixoticgeek Or if they mean 'achey muscles and feeling kind of physically tired for no clear reason' *just fucking say that*! If it's supposed to be read as 'coughing, difficulty breathing and severe congestion' say so.
Like... maybe it's my neurospiciness and my tendency to take things literally that's the problem, but so often the way symptoms are described really doesn't help a lot. 'Flu-like symptoms'? That's so vague it's unhelpful. Influenza has lots of symptoms.
@quixoticgeek Or if they mean 'achey muscles and feeling kind of physically tired for no clear reason' *just fucking say that*! If it's supposed to be read as 'coughing, difficulty breathing and severe congestion' say so.
Like... maybe it's my neurospiciness and my tendency to take things literally that's the problem, but so often the way symptoms are described really doesn't help a lot. 'Flu-like symptoms'? That's so vague it's unhelpful. Influenza has lots of symptoms.
And this impacts so many other people with so many other illnesses too. And injuries. I know three people who have learned the hard way that Hollywood lied about fractured fingers - they might not hurt much at the time, or until you, say, bump the injured finger against something and almost pass out. (I have also learned myself that sprains don't always hurt when they happen - sometimes the only clue is that your foot is moving a bit weird and it was kinda hard to take your shoe off. And then the next day...)
@quixoticgeek apparently "all sorts of other nasty shit" includes such fun things as polio and HIV.
@viq yep. I didn't want to list all of them. Cos character count. But those two are in there.
@quixoticgeek And we need to remember the 1917 to 1920 flu pandemic is estimated to have killed 17 million up to possibly 100 million people!
@quixoticgeek Very much so!
I had influenza—the real thing—about 30 years ago. Three days of fever and bone-deep joint aches then two weeks off work recovering from it. And I got off lightly! Subjective experience was *worse* than post-vaccine COVID.
@cstross @quixoticgeek Yeah. The last time I had 'flu, I was so unwilling to get out of bed that I ended up giving up a 20-a-day smoking habit
@cstross @quixoticgeek Covid made me sick, Influenza made me worried.
@cstross @quixoticgeek That is light, you are correct. I've had real influenza three times; all three times were *weeks* of sickness and required hospital stays (and I have no existing conditions).
I don't think we'll *ever* get people to stop using the term "the flu", but we *can* start using the term "influenza" when we mean, you know, influenza.
"The flu," like has been said, sounds potentially mild. I have noticed a different reaction out of people when I use the full term "influenza."
@cstross @quixoticgeek Swine flu was the worst for me - spent the first couple of days barely conscious, interspersed with immediate dashes to the loo thanks to the gastro-intestinal side of it. Otherwise, even picking up a glass of water took effort.
Covid was nowhere near as bad for me. (Also post-vaccine.)
@cstross @quixoticgeek the only time I’ve been hospitalized for diabetic ketoacidosis was in the middle of a very bad bout of influenza. (I was caught early and wasn’t even in DKA when I was diagnosed! But the flu … roughed me up.)
@cstross @quixoticgeek Absolutely. I've had influenza twice, and both times I was really poorly for about three weeks. It's no joke. It's right up there in terms of horrible experiences with cryptosporidiosis and pneumonia.
@cstross the way a doctor described it to me "if you didn't feel like you were hit by a train, it wasn't influenza". And having had influenza and COVID within 3 months of each other. I agree. COVID was worse (this was march 2020), but neither was in anyway pleasant.
