The piggy flu is once again visiting our house. Topher had it two weeks ago and was down for 5 days. Now little Miss Meghan is laying about on the couch, coughing, running a high temp and feeling miserable overall. Poor babies. We’ve been treating ourselves, all of us, with elderberry syrup, homemade by a dear friend of ours and it is keeping the worst of it at bay.

Some interesting things we have learned about it. First and foremost, it’s blown way out of proportion by the media! When Topher was first diagnosed with the swine flu, TJ and Meghan came home from school and I told them what their brother had. Poor TJ burst into tears, saying, “He’s going to die! We’re all going to die!”. Took me a few minutes to talk him back off the ledge. My goodness. The fear the media can instill and it’s power is just amazing to me. Another thing we learned is that if anyone has the ‘flu’ right now, it is almost certain that it is the swine flu as the ‘regular’ flu season has not even started yet. Something else of note is that the CDC has recommended, just very recently, to not treat initial symptoms, within the first 48 hours of onset, with Tamiflu in people without high risk factors. (I wonder if that will change now that there was a recent death of a teenager here in NC who started exhibiting symptoms but whose doctor followed the CDC protocol and did not treat him with Tamiflu because he didn’t have risk factors, but then ended up dying from complications. I hope they do reconsider their policy!). I’ve also done some more reading and thankfully, it appears that you can only get H1N1 once because your body builds up immunities to the virus, so that is good to know.

I do believe all in our household are going to be downing daily doses of elderberry syrup this autumn and winter as it is an amazing natural remedy that helps with immunity building, respiratory strength, asthma and many other things!