Selects: How the Flu Works

Every year the flu virus makes the rounds, laying up young and old alike for days before moving on to another hapless victim. But flu viruses can mutate and once in awhile they turn into something much deadlier, a pandemic that can kill millions. Learn all about it with Josh and Chuck in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 2:03Speaker 03

  Oh, God. Hi, everybody. It's Chuck here. Oh, boy. My selection this week is how the flu works. And I'll give you one reason why. This is from November 14th, 2017.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  I hope you like it. I'm going back to bed.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:37Speaker 04

  Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is Stuff You Should Know about the flu, which I have.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  You know the flu, do you?

• 2:50Speaker 04

  I don't know, man. I can't, I can't, I've been on the planet for 41 years.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:55Speaker 04

  I still can't really tell the difference between a flu and a cold.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  I think the difference that I can tell, and I don't get the flu much.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  You know, I always get the stomach bug, which

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Buh.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  as it turns out, is not a flu, I just learned.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  No.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  But, um, I don't get the flu-flu much, but I can always tell, though, when I'm super achy. Like, the flu just makes me feel like dog doo-doo.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Whereas a cold is just a big inconvenience.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've had, uh, no, I've definitely had, like, lots of aches and, um, I woke up, like, shivering one night.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Oh, so you had a fever, for sure.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  I guess so. Um, I guess it must have just been one night and in the middle of the night. So that's, that's the flu, right?

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  So I guess I do have the flu. No, no joke, everybody.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Well, I'm erecting the clear glass in between us.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think that I've had it long enough now, based on the research from this article, that I'm not contagious, or else I would have called this off.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  So did you get it in New York, I wonder?

• 3:52Speaker 04

  I think so. Yeah, and I'm like-

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Dirty, dirty New Yorkers.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Right, yeah. Which I was like, I was just walking, walking around, like, with my hands, um, inside of a couple of, like, plastic Dwayne Reed bags. And it still didn't work.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Well, that was your problem, probably, right there. Dwayne Reed.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Because I didn't take them off when I ate.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Gross.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, yes, we were in New York for some Bell House shows, right? Those went pretty well.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thought they were great.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  All right, so the fluch. We won't reminisce about past victories. We'll just talk about the flu instead.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, how about a stat right off the, the get-go here?

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  The flu, the CDC-

• 4:34Speaker 04

  And also, sorry, everybody, for the sniffling that's going to inevitably happen. I'm trying hard not to do it.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  You're a method podcaster.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Which is also what I said in my very first episode.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Remember that?

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  It's not any funnier now.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  So the CDC, right here in Atlanta, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not the CDCP.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  No, they're just stuck with the original.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. They reckon that about five to twenty, between five percent and twenty percent of United States peoples get the flu each year compared to about ten percent to twenty-five percent in dirty cold Canada.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Right, I know. And normally, when you get the flu, it's just, you're laid up for a couple of days, right?

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Like you said, you feel like dog do or something like that.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  That's the seasonal flu. But even with the seasonal flu, which usually here in the United States or in North America runs from, what, like October to March?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, roughly.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  And then, I didn't really think about this before, but in the Southern Hemisphere, it runs the opposite and actually peaks in August.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Most of the time, it's just an inconvenience for you, but it actually kills people sometimes.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it can be dangerous, for sure.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  So in 2011 and 12, that was a pretty low year for deaths from the flu in the US. There were 12,000 people who died from the flu.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  Or complications from the flu. 2012, 13 flu season, 56,000 people died that year. And I think the average is something around 36,000 people in the US die from the flu every year.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and apparently, the World Health Organization says around the world, as many as a quarter of a million people to a half a million people can die every year from the flu.

• 6:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  It's a lot of folks.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  It is. So, I mean, and the idea of dying from the flu, that's awful, because, I mean, if you feel bad enough as it is from a flu that you recover from in a few days, imagine dying from that. That would just be a terrible way to die.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  And the whole thing, Chuck, comes down to this little tiny virus, the influenza virus, and there's different types. And influenza, I found, is actually a shout out to the Italian name for it originally. Did you know this?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Uh, did not.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  So I'm gonna say it normally, but then you have to say it in your famous Italian accent. Influenza di Fredo.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Are you talking about the influenza de Fredo?

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, which means influenza of the cold.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Oh, all right.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  A lot of, for many, many, many, many years, because the flu is most predominant in the colder months,

• 7:31Speaker 04

  everybody just assumed that it was the actual cold that was getting you sick.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:37Speaker 04

  That turns out not to be true. It's an actual, it's a virus that does seem to favor the cold, drier conditions of the winter months. But this little tiny virus gets into your body and it starts this chain reaction that is just fascinating.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it is a respiratory illness. So like I said before, when you hear people say the stomach flu, which I've said a lot in my life, because I get it once a year with the poopy butt and the vomitous mouth

• 8:08Speaker 03

  and the ill belly.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  At the same time, though, I can't, I think I've asked you this before, but I don't.

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Has it literally ever happened at the same time? I think once in my life.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Man, that's rough.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  I was on the john with a bucket.

• 8:20Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  It's so rough.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Well, the worst time I ever had it, I may have told this story before, I was sick at a friend's house, which is the worst, when I was not living in Atlanta, but I was in Atlanta.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  And I was like, I gotta, I just gotta get to my mom's house.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Mom?

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was like, I just was much more comfortably being sick there.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  And he was working. It was just one of those things. And so I got in my brother's car that I was borrowing while I was in town.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  I don't like where this story is going.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  And I drove, no lie, probably about 100 miles an hour to Snellville from Atlanta.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Thinking, and I pooped in my pants in the car. And I remember thinking, if a cop pulls me over, he would have to be a cold, heartless individual to give me a ticket because I would just say, sir, don't take me to prison, take me to a hospital because I'm dying.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  So I drove 100 miles an hour. It was kind of fun.

• 9:18Speaker 04

  So you made it home, you showed up with poopy pants and your mom took care of you?

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Yep, showed up to Diane's house and I lived.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  But anyway, that was a long way of setting up this, which is that is actually not a flu. The stomach flu is not, because the flu is 100% a respiratory illness.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And is not something that happens in your stomach or in your butt.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  Right. And let's talk first before we talk about the actual effect of the flu. Let's talk about the virus a little bit for a second, okay? So back in 1931, there was this Iowa farm physician, which is to say he was a human physician of humans, but he probably lived on a farm because it was Iowa in 1931.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  His name was Richard Shope, and he was trying to figure out what this bug that was getting people was. And he investigated with pigs first, because there are plenty of other animals that can come down with the flu, not just humans, right?

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  And he finally isolated, he isolated a flu virus in swine, and it led to this discovery of the isolation of the flu virus in humans, too. So right after that, they started classifying the flu by strains. You got A, B, and C, right?

• 10:34Speaker 03

  So A is the most common and the most severe. That's the bad news.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  B is a little milder, a little less prevalent, and then we go all the way down to C, which is, I get the feeling C doesn't happen a lot, and it definitely isn't the one that you're gonna have like a big epidemic of the flu from a C.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I couldn't find much on C influenza either.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Poor C.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'll make a comeback one day, and it'll shock the heck out of all of us, right?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Probably so.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  So Type A infects all sorts of different species, right? Humans, birds of all kinds, pigs, bats, horses even.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, remember the avian flu? That was, that scared the world.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  And that was A.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  That was A strain.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  B strain is almost exclusively infective of humans. Apparently, the only other species we've ever found a Type B influenza virus in is seals. God knows where they got it from. Or if we got it from seals, who knows? Maybe up north? I don't know. And then that C one, it just infects humans and pigs. So you got the three types.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  And then one other thing about them, about the classification of flu strains is that there are also subtypes, right? And so you mentioned like avian flu. And the one that scared everybody was, I think, H5N1.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was it. I remember.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  So the H and the N are the, they refer to the two kinds of, the two main proteins that you find on the outside of a flu virus. Hemagglutinin and neuraminase. Okay? And so depending on those types of H protein or M protein, that's, that's how they subtype flu strains.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, I mean, that's a good little factoid. I don't think anyone really understands what those letters mean.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  That's what they mean.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  You know?

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  But as far as you're concerned, just pay attention to the news and when they talk about the scary ones, they'll mention those letters and numbers and then you can impress your friends.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can be like, oh, well, they're talking about hemagglutinin and neuraminase.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  And they'll say, shut up, nerd. I hope you get sick. So as far as the, the standard flu that we're talking about here, the virus, it gets into your body and it, it kind of makes a beeline to your respiratory tract. And it binds with your cells. It's viruses. Did we do one, a general on, on viruses?

• 13:14Speaker 04

  The one I think we really went in depth on was HIV, where we talked about how a virus enters the body and takes over.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  It's just vicious.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  It is, but it's also, it's kind of like admirable in a really like deadly efficient way, you know?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  It is. So they bind to the surface of, of the cells in that respiratory tract and then they say, hey, I'd like you to meet my little friend RNA. Why don't, why don't I inject my genetic information into your nucleus and see how you like it?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Right. And when it does that, the, the cell has been officially hijacked and the virus uses the cell's own RNA transcription process to

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Create the proteins that are needed to make new versions of the virus. So the virus is using this host cell in your respiratory tract to make copies of itself. And suddenly, before the cell knows what's going on, it's made millions of copies of these viruses, right? And apparently, when you talk about it step by step, it seems like this takes a little while.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  No, in seconds. Seconds after that the virus has entered your respiratory cell, millions of copies of it have been made.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, like this is happening so fast. It moves in there, it says, I'm in charge now, so.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Out of the way.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, completely out of the way. I'm running the show here. We're copying each other and we're gonna move out to the cell membrane, because this cell's gonna die very quickly. And then that's just gonna poof me out into the body further to infect other cells. And it's scary how quickly this happens.

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Right, so if you think about it, if that first cell produces millions of viruses, viral copies, and then they're released from the cell out into the rest of the other respiratory cells, and each of those infects another cell, and then those cells all make millions, you see how quickly these viruses reproduce in your body.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  And once that starts to happen, you are infectious. I think once that first cell ruptures, you become infectious. But this can be like a day before symptoms, right? So this is something, people are always saying like, oh, I'm not infectious anymore. Like me, I said it earlier too, right?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  I know.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  But supposedly, the day before you even know you're sick, the day before the first symptoms start, before you start like sniffling a little bit or whatever, you're infectious, buddy.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  And you're infectious up to seven days after that day you first start showing symptoms with the flu. And if you're a kid, you can be infectious even longer, because if kids are anything, they're walking germ factories.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  They are disgusting monsters.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  It's hilarious.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  It's true, man. Like, uh, my kid didn't get sick at all for the first eighteen months of her life, and I thought, I've got a wonder baby.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, really.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  And I don't know what's going on. We put her in daycare a couple of days a week, and she was sick nonstop for the next six months.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Man, that is rough.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  It is rough. And then they get the family sick. And we'll talk a little bit about that and how that happens. But all this is to say, during flu season, especially if you work in like an office where, you know, when you hear like the flu's going around or whatever, or anywhere you work or in school, if you hear about the flu going around, even if you don't feel sick, or your cube mate doesn't feel or look sick, just start washing your hands a lot.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. That's like, they say that's the best way to prevent getting the flu or spreading the flu is washing your hands a lot.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Do it a lot.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  It's so simple that you almost might discount it, but it's actually true. Like, that's the best way to do it. You can wash the flu virus off of your hands with some soap that will bind to it, and the water will wash it right off.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Wash that flu right out of your hair.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. And if you have the flu, stay home.

• 17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  Everybody but me. Stay home.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Well, we're up against it. We had to record today.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  And also wash your hands just constantly. Like, if I'm about to touch anything, I'll wash my hands first.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  If I'm gonna go somewhere outside of the hot zone, which is whatever room I'm sequestered in, you know, I will wash my hands, you know?

• 17:33Speaker 03

  I appreciate that. I mean, trust me, we're in this tiny studio now, the three of us.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  I know. I'm trying not to breathe.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Uh, you've done all this on one breath. It's impressive.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  I know.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Um, well, quickly, before we take a break, so you can breathe again, uh, we're gonna talk about symptoms afterward. Uh, before you get these symptoms, though, what's happening is your respiratory system is gonna become inflamed. And this inflammation might stick around for a few weeks, uh, but from there, it moves into your bloodstream, and then that's when you're gonna get these symptoms, once it sort of moves into the bloodstream.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  And we're gonna talk about the symptoms, as promised, right after this.

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• 18:56Josh Clark?

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• 22:01Speaker 04

  All right, Chuck.

• 22:01Speaker 06

  Did you breathe?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, a little bit. Let's talk symptoms, okay? You know what I need? I need one of those like reeds that Bugs Bunny used to hide in the water when Elmer Fudd was hunting him.

• 22:14Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  I could just like get a long one and maybe a crazy straw would be even better. And just like pipe it out to the air duct right there.

• 22:22Speaker 06

  That's a great idea.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  What do you think? It'll get everybody else sick except you and Jerry.

• 22:27Speaker 06

  So the symptoms sound a lot like a cold because the symptoms are kind of the same.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  A cold is usually not as fraught with potential complications and maybe a little less severe, but they're pretty close, which is why you couldn't tell earlier if you had a cold or a flu.

• 22:43Speaker 04

  Right, but that fever, that's the big one apparently, it's a big distinction between the two.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's kind of the way I distinguish it, right?

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and colds are also caused by viruses or caused by coronaviruses, which can, there are types of coronaviruses that are really bad that cause like MERS and SARS.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  But for the most part, when you catch a cold from a coronavirus, it's a low-level virus, or it's a rhinovirus, that's the other one that causes the common cold, right? So it's just a different kind of virus producing similar symptoms to a flu.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Do you remember when Peter Sarsgaard was on Saturday Night Live years ago?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  No.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  He was, you know, the actor?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  He was on there during the SARS, when there was that SARS scare in the United States, and one of their skits was he had developed the Sarsgaard Sarsgaard, which was just basically a surgical mask, but it was just funny. They said Sarsgaard Sarsgaard like 30 times, and I laughed every time.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  I think his younger brother was Pennywise the Clown in the It movie, right?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't know.

• 23:50Speaker 04

  I'm pretty sure that was a Sarsgaard, and he is amazing.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Have you seen it?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  No.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  Oh, you gotta see it, you're gonna love it.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Now, was he a Sarsgaard or a Skarsgard?

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Oh, God, I didn't know there were two different things.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Well, there are the Skarsgards, which is, like, Stellan Skarsgard is the dad.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  And then the son was the dude on True Blood, the vampire show, and then recently on that Pretty Little Liars, I think?

• 24:19Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  The one with Nicole Kidman?

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  That's Alexander Skarsgard.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  I think that might be him. Is Sarsgaard the one who's in Fargo?

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Sars, no.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Who's that? Peter Sarsgaard?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's another dude. What is up with all these guys?

• 24:35Speaker 04

  So are you sure you're not just dropping the K off of Peter Skarsgard?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  All right, here's the deal.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  The guy in Fargo.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Man, this is such a bad sidetrack already.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  It's pretty bad.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  The guy in Fargo was Peter Stormare.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Okay. So he's not even in the equation then?

• 24:54Speaker 03

  No, but I definitely know that there is Peter Sarsgaard.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Because he either was or is married to Maggie Gyllenhaal.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I guess I knew that.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Peter Sarsgaard.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  And then there's Stellan and Alexander Skarsgård, and I don't know who the clown was.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  It's Bill Skarsgård.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  And is he related to the Skarsgård's?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  I guess so. Yeah, I believe he's the youngest of them.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:21Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was Tim Curry I was talking about.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  No, actually, we'd never looked stuff up, but I did look that up.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Because the headline here says Alexander Skarsgård's reaction to his brother Bill's

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  clown costume.

• 25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's, it's good. His acting goes way beyond the costume. They did good with the costume, but it was.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Good movie?

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, it was, it was good.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  I know there were so many people screaming at their phones, but I think we finally got it right.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry about that, everybody. I also want to apologize for any medical students who are being forced to listen to this as part of their class. Hopefully, your instructor fast-forwarded through that part.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  All right. This all got started with Sarsgaard's Sarsgård's.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, that's right, because that's from the coronavirus. This is the influenza virus we're talking about that creates this inflammation, which is your immune response, right? In your lungs?

• 26:16Speaker 03

  That's correct. And the symptoms, like a cold, are coughing, sneezing, the fever, which is different, like we said, with the flu.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Achy body, which usually comes with that fever, and then Josh's runny nose and congestion that you can hear, and your overall lethargy.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I am a little under the weather, I guess is a good way to put it.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  I can tell.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  So, those are just standard flu symptoms. You can have secondary symptoms from complications of the flu, right?

• 26:46Speaker 04

  One thing that that has long gone hand in hand with the flu, as far as like death from flu complications goes, is bacterial pneumonia.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's no good.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  And for a very long time, science wasn't quite sure why that why you were just so susceptible to bacterial infections when you were battling the flu. And they figured it out. It's actually your body's immune response that is responsible for it, right?

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  So when you have the flu and your body starts to battle it off and you get a fever and and your lungs become inflamed, that's that's your immune your immune system's response to the flu virus. But when your body says, okay, calm down, everybody, let's bring the temperature back down, and your body represses its own immune response, it opens the door for bacteria that normally it would be able to fight off to take advantage of this kind of naturally weakened state that your immune system's in. And you can you're much more susceptible to infections from bacteria. And that's where pneumonia comes from. You can get viral pneumonia, but you you usually get bacterial pneumonia.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  And that's the stuff that people can die from because that bacteria infects your air sacs in your lungs, which fill with fluid and pus and blood. And you die from choking on bloody froth that fills up your airway.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not it's a bad jam, man.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Severe dehydration is another secondary symptom of the flu. That's why, of course, you always want to drink plenty of water when you have a cold or flu.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  I looked that one up too, Chuck, because if you think about it, why? Why would you be dehydrated from the flu? It's from sweating?

• 28:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  Your nose running?

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're just leaking fluids.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, you are. And like they start to add up and all of a sudden you're dehydrated before you even knew it.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  That's right. Ear infections, especially if you're a kid, sinus issues. Emily always gets bad sinus problems along with this stuff.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  I know. She was starting to get a little sniffly. Is she sick?

• 28:50Speaker 03

  She did get sick.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Oh, that poor lady.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, New York, man.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  It killed everyone I love. And then if you, like in Emily's case, she's slightly asthmatic. But if you are asthmatic, you have like diabetes, it can make that stuff worse.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. She doesn't have diabetes, right?

• 29:10Speaker 03

  No.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Well, the reason diabetes is comorbid with the flu or is problematic when you have the flu is because type one diabetes especially is an autoimmune disease, so your immune system's already

• 29:25Speaker 04

  repressed, I guess.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  And then heart conditions can be exacerbated by it because you're getting less oxygen from your lungs into your bloodstream, which strains the heart. And if it's already weak, people have heart attacks from the flu if they already have a heart condition. Isn't that crazy?

• 29:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Again, it's a bad jam.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Well, actually, we in the episode coming up about the silly one, about the ten cursed movies. Remember the little girl from Poltergeist? Died from, at 12, from a heart attack brought on by the flu.

• 30:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Right?

• 30:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, or she had like a stomach blockage. They initially diagnosed it as the flu.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. But I thought it was not never like a virus like that?

• 30:11Speaker 04

  I don't think so. I think they mistook it.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  All right, well, then forget all that.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  But people do, so your point still remains correct.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  Okay. So how you get the flu? Is this, like you said, it's generally about November through March. January and February tend to be the worst of it here in the United States. And as we mentioned, offices and schools especially, because children are filthy monsters, who just don't wash hands and they breathe on each other and touch each other and they don't cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  But it's pretty cute when they hug each other.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  It's very cute, actually.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  It's worth, it's worth all the sickness in the world.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  It's pretty great. But that's the reason that kids tend to spread it more, because as much as you try and teach them to cover their mouth when they cough and sneeze and wash their hands a lot, it's just not really on their radar like it is for adults.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  No.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  You know?

• 31:06Speaker 04

  No, because they are dirty, dirty, dirty creatures.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  And then, you know, the kid then in turn brings it home and the family gets infected pretty quickly because try as you might, there's just a lot of close contact with kids that you can't avoid and even if you're washing your hands, they will find a way to infect you.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Right, and if you go even further back, there's an even earlier origin before kids picking it up at daycare or preschool for the flu. Usually, it comes from other animals, we're finding, right?

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Very frequently, birds, like we were saying, right? And they used to think that for a human to catch a flu, from a bird especially, that flu had to show up in a mixing vessel, usually a pig, which was capable of taking, it could be infected by a bird flu and a human flu. And flu viruses have this amazing talent called reassortment. Where a flu strain and another flu strain can get together and be like, oh, hey, you have eight proteins that make up your RNA? I do too, let's mix and match and see what happens. And they thought for a long time that this really only took place in pigs and then out

• 32:26Speaker 04

  would come a new super virus that no one had ever seen before that humans could catch. But from Southeast Asia, people being in close contact with infected birds, especially like in the poultry industry or something, there had been cases that started in the 90s of avian flu coming directly from birds to humans. So that theory went out the window.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  And that's what set off those fears of a bird flu pandemic that we lived with for many years.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. As far as, and you know, a lot of that was just spread from bird poop.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it scared people because that, that, those bird flus are no joke. Like, they, they have like a 60% mortality rate. 60%, 6 out of 10 people who come down with H5N1 bird flu die, right?

• 33:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Luckily, it's really, really difficult to catch it even when you are around sick birds. It doesn't very frequently make the jump to humans, but it can, is what they, what they found.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, as far as the regular flu, the, the garden variety flu that we're talking about mainly here, uh, it spreads from, uh, well, like we said, from, from touching stuff, from coughing and sneezing. When you cough and sneeze, even, even if you think you're covering your mouth pretty well,

• 33:47Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  um, there may be little, little fluids squirting out between your fingers, uh, up to a few feet.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Like a fire hose.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  It's in the air around you. Um, that stuff can travel, you know? So if that lands on a doorknob, or if someone covers their mouth like a, like a normal, and then opens a door, or borrows a stapler, or whatever, it's gonna be on that doorknob, and then you touch it. And that's why like hand washing by the sick and by the non-sick is so crucial.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. And if you're like, uh, having an anxious day at work and you're doing your normal thing of chewing on your stapler to relieve anxiety, and the guy who borrowed it was sick, you're toast.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  You are toast. And as you mentioned earlier, it bears repeating, uh, you can be sick a day before symptoms and you can, uh, or you can be contagious a day before symptoms and still remain contagious up to seven days after the symptoms start.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  So even if you feel better after day four, you could still be spreading that junk around for a few more days.

• 34:55Speaker 04

  Right, and they say that even after you feel better, you should stay in bed an extra day, because again, your immune system is, is compromised and you are, are, like, you can catch other stuff. So you wanna be careful. That extra day really pays off.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  And that's when you just lay in bed and watch Stranger Things 2.

• 35:13Speaker 04

  Right. I haven't seen it yet, is it good?

• 35:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we just finished it last night.

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Did you see the first season?

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, that was great.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Season two is just as great, if not better, I'm happy to say.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  I'm glad to say that, too.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  I was a little nervous, you know, cuz it was something I loved and it's like, oh, man. Season two, a lot of pressure.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, that's how it happens. The sophomore season is very frequently like, uh, everyone's aware of the success of the show and what people are saying about it. And they try to adapt to the expectations rather than continuing on doing what they were doing before. But good for you guys, Stranger Things.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so great. I want to get those Duffer Brothers on Movie Crush.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that'd be cool.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Those guys would be great. Um, should we take a break?

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think so.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  All right, we'll come back and talk a little bit about pandemics.

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• 39:59Speaker 04

  All right, Chuck. So, we were talking about how seasonal flu has seasons. That's why it's called seasonal flu, right?

• 40:06Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  That's, I guess, one classification of flus. There's also pandemic flu. And the same kind of flu virus can be a pandemic flu or a seasonal flu. And I think usually the way it happens is a new virus will emerge from, say, like livestock or poultry or something like that and infect humans. And if it's totally novel, where no human has ever encountered a flu of this type before, it can just lay waste to people. It can kill a lot of people. It can infect a lot of people. It can spread the world. And when that happens, it becomes classified as a pandemic flu. After a couple of rounds around the world, people will have started to develop an immunity to it, but it'll still be passed around.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  And so, for the decade or so, it can be the predominant strain of the flu, but it'll be, it'll have changed over to a seasonal type of flu. So, it's almost like the pandemic versus seasonal type flu describes how contagious it is and the, how virulent it is. I think that's the big distinction.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I think also in a pandemic, doesn't that mean it has left the country?

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that is kind of one of the indicators of it, too.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. 1918, there was, these numbers are staggering. This is the worst flu pandemic in world history in 1918. For, I don't know what month exactly, but 1918 and 19. And it killed more than 20 million people around the world.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  And it killed most of those people, actually, in four months, from September to December.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Isn't that crazy? More lives were lost than all 20th century wars combined to the flu.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. You said 20 million?

• 41:55Speaker 03

  20 million worldwide, about half a million in the United States.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  I saw in many reputable places, 50 million people died around the world.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Man, that is just, it's staggering.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it was like right at the end of World War I. And just came out of nowhere. And one of the other really noteworthy things about it that just baffled people was it was killing like healthy people under the age of like 22, 23, 24. Like just healthy young people killed by the flu. And a lot of them died from pneumonia. And they finally figured out that it was because it had been about 20 something years since a flu resembling that type of strain had made the rounds. So people under say like age 25 had never been exposed to it. So it was a novel flu which just leveled the, the people it was exposed to who had never, never encountered something like it before.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's, I mean, it's scary to think about. I mean, truly, that couldn't happen today, could it? Or could it?

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 42:57Speaker 03

  Man, you think that we could, had something like that off these days?

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Um, do you know like a third of the population of the world was infected with that flu that year?

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Isn't that crazy?

• 43:08Speaker 03

  I know, that's hard to believe.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, that can totally happen. It's a, it's a real concern.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  All right. So as far as your risk of getting the flu, uh, if you're a kid, like there's different risk groups, like high risk, low risk, whatever, uh, medium or average risk. Uh, but if you're under two years old, your, your little immune system isn't quite smart enough yet to know how to fight things off. So you're definitely more at risk. And as always, uh, what affects the children also affect the elderly. So if you're over 65, um, seniors, is elderly wrong to say?

• 43:45Speaker 04

  I think elderly, it's technically 81.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 43:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  All right. So we'll go with seniors.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  Seniors. Active senior adults who have decades left ahead of them.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  That's right. Uh, who else? Anyone who has a, any kind of chronic, like I mentioned, asthma, diabetes, any kind of chronic condition, uh, if you're pregnant.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  If you work in a hospital or a doctor's office.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Or nursing home.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Nursing home is not just people who work there, but the residents too are in a really vulnerable position.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 04

  Because they are in the elderly age range. Their immune systems are pretty compromised. If they're in a nursing home, they're probably ill already. And then they're living in close quarters with other people who are ill. That's a recipe for disaster.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure is. It's also a recipe for tapioca pudding.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  It is. The best around.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Remedy wise, and we'll talk about vaccinations here in a minute, because I thought that was kind of one of the most interesting parts of this. But as far as remedies, if you get the flu, it's a virus, so you can't take antibiotics.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  No.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  You can't take a pill that's going to cure you. There are some antiviral drugs, which I've never tried any of these. Have you?

• 44:59Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  No?

• 45:00Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  I tried Zycam last year once. I think that's for colds.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought that was like discredited.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I had a few people say, oh, you know, you should try Zycam. It helps not catch your cold faster. It killed my sense of taste and smell.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  For several days to the point where I was scared.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  I don't remember that. I'll bet you were scared.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I looked it up and it's a thing.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  Oh, I do remember that, actually.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's just really unnerving, the idea of maybe it's permanent.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was pretty freaky.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll bet.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  And super noticeable. It wasn't like a subtle thing.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  You'd be like, chili, I miss you.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  So that was my experience. I'm not making some sweeping statement about that medication.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Way to COA, man.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  But there are antiviral drugs called, there's one called Tamiflu. Relenza, Flumadine, a little on the nose, if you ask me.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Flu Stop. Well, any viral drugs, they seem like a good idea, but they seem like a good idea under the premise that seasonal flu strains were used to think, they used to think that they died out at the end of a season, right?

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Well, they started tracking them, like, our global monitoring system is really top-notch, and they can track flu around the world, and they've found that seasonal flu, at the end of the season in North America, it just goes to South America.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  So, since, since that's the case, when you use antivirals and you're exposing these flus that go on to survive, you're also training them, evolutionarily speaking, to adapt so that those, those antiviral drugs are useless against them for people who, like, really need them.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  So, just like with antibiotics, using antivirals just to cure a common flu, or to shorten a common flu, is probably a bad idea when you're talking about the whole population.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's what they do, they, they, what they try to do is just keep the spread, cellular spread, from happening as, as much as it can.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Isn't that sort of the easiest way to say it?

• 47:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, there's, there's, one keeps them, well, two, a pair of them keep them from replicating, and then another one traps them inside a cell once they enter.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  It's like, oh, God, I can't get out, the door's locked, and then, death.

• 47:25Speaker 03

  And they're all prescription drugs.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  If I'm not mistaken.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  So, vaccines are, like, pretty hot, they're like the hot thing to do on a Friday night, is to go get a flu vaccine, right?

• 47:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't get, uh, I didn't get flu shots for many, many, many, many years, until I had a kid.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they say, like, if you, if you, especially if you have a baby under six months of age, they can't be vaccinated, and so everyone around them should be vaccinated, is the, the recommended, recommendation from the CDC.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, our close family, the, the grangrans and the abbas, all, and the pop pops, and the papas, and the poo paws, and the meemings, and the momos.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  Hey, alright, yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, Momo got a flu shot.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  That was nice of her. She's very kind.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Uh, so yeah, we all got flu shots and I, I just wasn't, you know, I never got the flu much. I never, I, I didn't have a disbelief in the flu vaccine. I was just like, nah, I don't, I don't really need to bother with that.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  So I was, I was fine.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  That, do you get them now though? Now, is it a habit of yours now?

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, now just, they just sort of recommend it when you have kids up, up until they're a certain age, you should, get vaccinated as a family.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  Right. And when you have kids, if you get them vaccinated, you, um, once they're able to be vaccinated, again, under six months, they say, no, no, no, don't do that. Um, when they're young though, and you're getting them vaccinated, they need to be vaccinated twice, like a month apart.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  And so with flu vaccines in general, they recommend that you get it as early in the season as possible, because it takes about two weeks for that to take effect. So with a kid then, I guess you would want to get, um, so that six weeks before the flu season? I don't know. Or is that, or is that second one pretty much like, okay, now it's taking effect?

• 49:19Speaker 03

  I'm not sure.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  So is it four weeks plus two weeks?

• 49:22Speaker 03

  I don't remember the schedule. Um,

• 49:26Speaker 03

  yeah, I don't remember the schedule.

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Well, ask your doctor, okay? We're not doctors. Stop pressuring us.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  They'll tell you, like, when you go to get your little kitty checkups, they say, you know, come back in this month and get your flu shot.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Number one, and then flu shot number two.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  And so for, um, a while there, they, there were two kinds of flu shots that the CDC recommended. One was an actual shot, the flu vaccine that was in a shot form.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  And then there was another one that's called a live attenuated, uh, influenza virus, which came in the form of a nasal spray. And that was usually recommended for kids. I don't know if it's because kids don't like needles or, or what, but the CDC has officially stopped recommending, um, nasal flu vaccines.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  So you don't do those anymore.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Well, and when they were doing it, when we say kids, you had to be over five, because it was a, like you said, a live, a live virus.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Right, it was a live weakened virus.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's different. Like, if you think, alright, I'm gonna get a flu shot, so that means I'm gonna get the flu virus shot into me, and so I might feel like I have the flu. That's not really the case. It's really kinda neat how they do it. These scientists and doctors, like you said, track what's going on in the world of flu, all over the world, and they they sort of make a, well, they don't sort of, they very definitely make a prediction and say, here's the flu strain specific to the United States, let's say, that I think we're gonna be faced with this year. And they make their best scientific guess possible, and that is the, you get a not-live

• 51:08Speaker 03

  version of that virus injected into your body. Your body sees, hey, foreign invaders here, let me produce antibodies. Then if that virus, or if the real flu knocks on your door later that winter, your body says, wait, I've met you before, and I'm gonna fight you.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  But it's pretty cool, like, and it literally, the effectiveness. Uh, I looked up this year, and it's a year-to-year thing. It's forty to sixty percent on this year's strain. And it varies because it really just depends on how well those scientists have predicted, how much they get it right.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Right, because if they get all three wrong, well, then you're toast when you encounter the flu that's going around that season.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really interesting.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  But even when they do get it right, it's kinda baffling that sometimes the flu vaccine just doesn't bestow any kind of immunity.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  Apparently, Australia just came out of a really bad epidemic flu season down there, and it didn't cause a lot of deaths, but everybody was sick with the flu. Um, it was a H3-type flu that went around, and even though that strain showed up in the vaccine that was given out, only like fifteen percent of people who got vaccinated and were exposed to the flu were immune to it. Like, eighty-five percent of people who got flu vaccines and then encountered the flu still got sick. That's a pretty bad track record for a flu vaccine, and they're just not sure why. One of the theories is so when they make flu vaccines, they grow them in egg protein typically, like hen's eggs.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  That's the medium they use to actually grow the viruses that they then kill. One researcher pointed out that at least one kind of flu virus mutates in the presence of egg protein. So that the virus that you put in to grow in there is different from the one that comes out. It's a mutated version. And so maybe that would would prevent your body from recognizing the original one that you were trying to introduce it to in the vaccine.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  So interesting.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  It is pretty interesting.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Well, and they say there's a list of people who should not receive the flu shot. And one of the, one of those qualifications is if you are allergic to chicken eggs, then you shouldn't get a flu shot.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's like a couple of other ways that they make flu shots, flu vaccines, but that chicken egg is the most predominant way to do it.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you're currently have a fever, wait on your flu shot. Under six months, of course, we said you cannot. If you have had flu shots in the past and you had a bad reaction, because like I said, it's not going to make you sick, but you might feel a little achy or have sore muscles or something. But you can have a bad reaction and if that's the case, then maybe flu shots aren't for you.

• 53:58Speaker 04

  Right. And if you're an anti-vaxer, then you probably already decided that flu shots aren't for you.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Which we will never do an episode on that.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Vaccinations?

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Oh, you don't think so?

• 54:12Speaker 04

  I don't know, man. So the, the idea that a flu vaccine can, you know, check all the boxes, but still just be wrong, wrong, wrong, or not confer immunity, has some people looking for a universal vaccine or one that lasts way longer than just a year. What they're targeting is so when you get a normal vaccine, that vaccine is based on that HA protein, the hemagglutin.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  And that's the most quickly evolving part of any flu virus, right?

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  So they're saying, well, let's look at other parts of the flu virus that don't evolve nearly as quickly and target that. And some of those parts are even basically universal among all flu viruses. So if you can find, if you can create a vaccine based on a stable part of a flu virus that's a part of every flu virus, one vaccine could confer ideally lifelong immunity from all influenza for anybody who takes the vaccine.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  One vaccine to cure them all?

• 55:17Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  So you got anything else?

• 55:23Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I guess we're not going to cover the boogie woogie flu.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  I thought that was boogie woogie fever.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  No, it's the rocking pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  Oh, that's nice. What's that from? Is that an Atlanta Rhythm Section song?

• 55:37Speaker 03

  No, they're better than that.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Well, since I said Atlanta Rhythm Section, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, this is a Simpsons overlooked, overlooked Simpsons bit from us. And this is not one of those, we get plenty of things where people are like, how could you not have mentioned this quote?

• 56:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Or this episode?

• 56:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  But the response was good, then people weren't necessarily poo-pooing it.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  No, and also, I want to say thank you to everybody who wrote in to just say congratulations or to thank us. That was all, every single one of those emails or tweets or posts were all well received. So thanks for those, guys.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Totally. But this is something we failed to mention, which definitely deserves its own email. And this is from Rich, our man on Cape Cod, as he says, "Hey, guys, was listening to The Simpsons two-parter, enjoyed it very much. You explained how an episode came to be from conception to animation, et cetera, and you paid respect to each portion, but then you slided off one of the most important men in the franchise. You just said, and then they slapped Denny Elfin's score on it, and it's done." Well. As any true Simpsons aficionado would know, Danny Elfman has never once written a score to The Simpsons. He wrote, as we know, just the title, or the-

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Theme.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  The theme song. So he says, "That job fell to the immensely talented and recently terminated via email, Alf Clausen. For 27 years, every score, every cue, every song was composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Clausen and his live orchestra. He's won two Emmys and seven Annie Awards for his work. The reason this was such a painful sight was because this omission has been happening for years. Clausen has worked insane hours writing music for a live orchestra to accompany an animated show. He's always played second fiddle. Nailed it, he said, to all those who think Elfman is any part of the show after he pinned the main title. In fact, the main title, theme song we all know and love, is actually Clausen's reorchestration

• 57:47Speaker 03

  of Elfman's theme that took place mid-season three with a lusher, more crisp orchestration."

• 57:54Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  I bet you anything Rich plays the oboe.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Alf Clausen, I'm so sorry.

• 57:59Speaker 03

  I know. He said, "I admire your podcast for bringing light to information that has been stuck lurking in the shadows. You always make sure credit is given to those who sometimes went their entire lives without getting the nod they deserve."

• 58:11Speaker 04

  Well, this guy's really turning the knife in our backs, isn't he?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  And I feel you owe Clausen that respect. So Alf Clausen, for real. And then it was a bit of a longer email. He told the story of how he was recently fired by email, which is not cool.

• 58:26Speaker 04

  No, it's definitely not.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  After 27 years-

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Of dedicated work.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  I know, man.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Not cool, guys.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  So that is Rich, our man on Cape Cod.

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Well, thanks a lot, Rich. Appreciate that. That was one of the better emails I've heard in a while.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  If you want to try and top Rich, let's see what you got. Send us an email, [email protected], and join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 59:11Josh Clark?

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  That sound? That's pro squash. Some of the fastest rallies in sport played inches from the crowd. The National Squash League is back in full swing for season four. The sport is heading to the 2028 Olympics for the first time, and you can see it up close right now in a city near you. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.