Tetanus vaccine

[Janne]

Do you good people get the (anti) Tetanus vaccine ?

I was of course vaccinated as recommended by WHO since childhood. Had a couple booster injections before age twenty.
I get tested about once every 5 years, and take a booster if needed.

Even if I try to be extra careful, scratches and cuts I get quite often!

 

[Tengu]

Essential in my trade...

But of course knowing my perchant for rusty metal, Village Surgery made sure I had it regularly all through my life.

I hope you all have had it done.

 

[Billy-o]

Tetany is another of those good words

 

[santaman2000]

As a kid I only got it immediately after any cut from some suspect object (yeah, I got a lot of them working or playing around farm equipment) Once I enlisted they were mandatory every 5 years and I've kept them up; although the current recommendations are every 10 years I believe. I keep most inoculations current if they require periodic boosters, plus the ones that are either single dose or two stage doses:
-Tetanus
-Flu
-Shingles
-Pneumocacol
-Lyme's Disease
-et al

 

[Toddy]

Like Tengu, for me it was considered a necessity.
Unfortunately I react very badly to the vaccine, or perhaps it's carrying medium since I had the same hot hard huge swelling from the flu' jab too.
Either way, my Doctor says, "We're not doing that again!", and I'm to have no more.

The sister of one of my colleagues died of lockjaw. It's a miserable way to die when the vaccine works for the vast majority. We were told that the vaccine has been available since the 1920's, and that still 10% of those who catch the disease die from it.

 

[ejtrent]

I cut myself often in my line of work but luckily its often with very clean and very sharp steel,

I just make sure my wound cleaning is up to par!

 

[Billy-o]

I was messing about in the lane as a 16 y.o. and got some glass in my foot, which neither I nor my mum could get all of it out with tweeezers. So, we went to casualty and a doctor rummaged about and nabbed it in the end. It hurt quite a lot and I performed as a brave little soldier, I thought. Then I was given a tetanus shot in my backside. But in the other leg. Meaning that when it swelled up and started with a prodigious aching, I was kind of bedridden for a day or so. I felt pretty hard done by the whole experience, I have to say

 

[Janne]

Did that experience teach you not to mess around barefooted?

 

[Billy-o]

Far from it

A year or two later, I went wading in the Thames at Reading and stepped on what I am guessing was a broken bottle. Massively stubbed my toe on a beach. The list just goes on and on

A few years later still (got kids by this point) I was up at about 3am and couldn't get back to sleep. So, I decided to sharpen all the kids pencils. Dropped one, immediately forgot about it, so that when I did eventually decide to go to bed I stepped on it. You have to imagine this: I put my foot on the pencil, blunt end towards my toes, sharp end towards my heel. It kind of stuck for a moment, then released as I lifted my foot, but from the blunt, toe end first. My heel came down on the recently sharpened end.

So, after a muffled squeal, I sat and tried to wriggle the big piece of graphite out of my foot with an awl for a bit before admitting that it wasn't coming out. I went to casualty first thing, where several other people had a go with similarly disappointing outcomes. This set of experimental procedures smarted: Not being my first rodeo, I knew that anaesthetics don't work hardly at all in your feet, there being not much meat there for it to get a purchase on. Anyway, a tweedy consultant later bustled in (I am pretty sure he arrived by horse) and said it had to be a general anaesthetic.

Now, this is a very busy hospital, so I am low on the priorities list and I spent the next three days hanging around in casualty as people came in with assorted heart attacks, traffic injuries and so forth - luckily it wasn't the weekend. Sititing in a curtained cubicle, I ended up listening to doctors delivering to various patients and relatives the worst possible news. I used to be on the other side of this whole process, so hearing things from the receiving end was new.

Anyway, still got a little blue tattoo on my foot as a memento and the long and short of it is that I am forever breaking, spraining, slicing up or in one way or another getting things jammed into my feet - saying nothing of occasional verucas etc

Genetic, I reckon.

 

[Janne]

Did not Darwin write something about this?

 

[Billy-o]

I have won the prize several times. Luckily my kids only look like me, they behave completely different

 

[santaman2000]

I've only injured my foot 4 times that I can remember. The first time I was a pre-teen and me and my buddies were playing in the creek when I stepped on something that cut open the instep of my right foot. They helped me hobble back up the road to my aunt's house (one of the buddies was her son, my cousin) She called Mama at work (Mama was a nurse at an eye clinic) and they took me there first because the Dr. she worked for thought he might sew it up, but when he saw it he realized it needed an ER Dr so they took me on the the ER. They gave me 3 or 4 shots of local anesthetic directly into the cut and then proceeded with 6 stitches and a set of crutches for a couple of weeks. Oh, yeah, and a tetanus shot in the arm.

The next time was a teenager in high school where we were fooling around after gym class and somebody slammed the locker room door (a steel door) on my left big toe. I wound up losing the toenail and waiting for it to grow a new one but with little medical treatment other than to clean up the wound; and oh, yeah, another teatnus shot in the arm.

The third time I was about 18 or 19 and working a summer job on a bridge construction site when I stepped on a nail that went right through my work boot in my right foot. Another trip to the ER and another tetanus shot in a very sunburned arm. Later that year when I was back in university that foor became infected and a boil opened on the top of the foot where it drained. That was cause for a course of antibiotics.

The last time was another nail through the foot a few years ago. The roofing crew had dropped a few while re-roofing my house after Hurricane Ivan and I stepped on one while out in the front yard. You guessed it, my last shot was expired so I got another one in the arm. I've kept them up to date since.

 

[Janne]

Does anybody NOT take the shot?

 

[Toddy]

Me now. It's been twenty years since I had a tetanus vaccination.

Or do you mean folks who are opposed to taking it rather than it's not medically recommended ?

M

 

[Janne]

Opposed. Interesting to hear the reasons.
We will not judge, of course...

I myself can not take the TB vaccine. Bad reaction, an anaphylactic one, but the speedy onset, within minutes, saved me as the doc could treat me accordingly.. We do not know why, as I refused testing.

It was my fifth TB jab, as my system did not form any antibodies.
Which meant I was not allowed to treat the TB risk groups. Now I do not care, I treat anybody, but we have basically no TB here.

 

[Toddy]

Ah, that really comes down to herd immunity, doesn't it?

"I'm alright Jack!", until there's an epidemic

I think the vaccines are an easy target for parents whose children don't do quite as well as they hoped for one reason or another, and I think others rather latched onto that excuse as a reason...iimmc?

I do know that I am pleased to live in a world without smallpox, and one where polio is no longer commonplace, here at least. Children in callipers and limping were not uncommon in my childhood. My husband's cousin has suffered from the aftereffects of polio for over sixty years. Now he needs two crutches to walk. The horrors of the iron lung were nightmare stories when I was little. Adult spoke very quietly about children, "...in the iron lung now", and with a kind of implication that hope and prayers were all that could be done.

The reduction in rubella has also greatly reduced the number of deaf/blind babies too......and if there was a Zika vaccine available, tell me that mothers in Brazil, etc., wouldn't take it ?

M

 

[Bionic]

Does anybody NOT take the shot?

I haven’t had one for at least 20 years. I keep asking at the drs surgery and they just say I’ll get a booster if I go to hospital with a bad enough cut to warrant it. Given that I’m a farmer and hence tend to get cuts and scratches off less than clean implements and I’m generally grubbing about in soil etc it seems a less than ideal situation but I just assumed this was the current way of thinking I’ve changed surgeries recently so I’ll have to enquire again

 

[Janne]

That is interesting what you say. I do not think there are any changes in the recommendation.
In Sweden ( should be similar in UK and rest of Europe) the recommendation was (when I lived there) for farmers to have periodic booster shots and to be tested for immunity.

Yes, you are high risk to get it.

We need to take extra care of our farmers, as they do the hard and dirty work growing our precious food!