Worried about 6 mo catching swine flu

[alfonzo]

I'm a worried parent at the moment. I believe my dh has swine flu and we have a 6mo dd. I had the vaccine when I was pregnant last winter, I am hoping this may provode some protection? Every small cough dd does I am convinced is her getting ill. But she has had all her usual milk today and wet nappies, sleeping fine. I googled swine flu and babies and read some scary stuff. Like if your baby does not wake up get medical attention quickly. Now I'm going to be lying in bed all night wondering if she is ok. Any advice/reassurance please?

well, I was pregnant at the time, and i wasnt too ill. Doctors said I would have been a lot more ill had I not had the injection, but I dont undertand why DS2 was so ill...... Not a reason not to get the vaccine though!I made my husband get the vaccine last week even though he didnt get ill when we all did!

If the vaccine had worked then you shouldn't have gotten sick at all. The 'oh you'll have a milder case' is used a lot to try to excuse it but there is no way of knowing if you would have had a mild case anyway without the vaccine. Vaccine failure does happen quite often and is actually quite common with the flu vaccine in particular especially with young children iirc.

My doc said if you catch it whilst vaccinated it will be milder, does seem bit of cop out to me too but three people who were vaccinated including me caught flu so surely it wouldnt have failed in all three of us?

Who knows Gheko! If you all caught one of the strains it vaccinates against then I would say it failed! Maybe you caught a different strain of flu.

lucy - your doctors were only guessing. I had swine flu while pregnant and had a very mild version of it. Never been vaccinated for any flu in my life.

Kangaroo, wow, weren't you all lucky?

DD1, DH and I all had swine flu last winter (confirmed by swab). I was pregnant at the time and DD1 was only 15 months old. We were ill for aaaaaages. Nowhere near hospitalistation I must stress, but very, very weak and sick and for a good week - completely unable to do anything but sit on the sofa.

I recovered completely after about 3 weeks.

OP - your DD will probably be fine, as I say, my DD1 had swine flu (confirmed by swab) at 15 months and was the quickest of all of us to recover.

Thanks youareallcunts so far so good. Dh is recovering and dd and I are fine. I think it's easy to assume babies are more vulnerable and worry a lot, when really we need to have faith in their bodies to do the job of fighting off illess.

wilhemina were you swabbed and confirmed? I was only ill for 2 days, yet was laboratory confirmed as having influenza b, which laid the kids low for weeks. Obviously my imune reaction to the vaccine was better than the kids.

No, I wasn't. We all had it at the same time, with variations of the same symptoms. DH got it worse than me, and he was knocked out for 2-3 days. I used my home-grown hippy approach to health to battle the bugs, and it worked. DS got it mildest of all, which is consistent with a study last year by the HPA (or is it HPE? Health Protection Executive?) which showed that in a boarding school, a small percentage of children showed symptoms of SF but when tested the vast majority of pupils were immune - therefore they had had the illness but showed no symptoms.