neither the el paso medical society its members nor pbs el paso shall be responsible for the views opinions or facts expressed by the panelists on this television program please consult your doctor [Music] hello i'm catherine berg and this is national influenza vaccination week yes there is a week for this and i know it's the beginning of december this is something really you should have done a couple of months ago but we're going to talk about it tonight the goal is to highlight the importance of getting your flu shot there's a lot of things going on in the world right now a lot of vaccine talk we're here to answer a lot of that here this evening as of air time we have about 10 people in america and that is changing literally you were talking about every hour that is changing every hour on the covid 19 omnichrome variant in this country and we are still looking at covet 19 delta variants and again we've got flu combined in all of that we know a lot more about covet 19 without question we're learning more and more about the different variants every single day how do the mutations occur where do they first present around the globe and we are constantly learning new things about how the vaccines are working and learning which therapeutics are working the best it's a science and although we all wish it would all move faster we get it we need to respect that this is still all relatively new and studies are being done constantly on every aspect of all of this it takes a bit of time and it takes a bit of patience and the answers are coming but we have to understand that there is some trust that we need to put into the experts that are doing this this is what they do all day every day and sometimes a little bit of trust goes a long way we're never here to tell you what to do but we are here to give you guidance and advice because it is a medical show we're here this evening and talk about the importance of still getting the flu vaccine again it's december you are able to do that anytime up and through you know late spring but we want you to get it now if you can um we were going to cover the vaccines also with kovid where we are with boosters what we're doing with children ages etc that's also changing a lot every day but there again is a lot of science in that area um there's questions so call us this is a live show the number to call is eight eight one zero zero one three again eight eight one zero zero one three this is a live program we have uh sarah lynn decker here and she is a third year medical student so sarah thank you so much for being here and she is joining us from um oh where'd you tell me laredo right laredo so she's here from laredo third year so thank you so much for being here i also want to say thank you very much to the american heart association who is underwriting this program this not this evening and to the el paso county medical society who brings the show to you each and every month i'm catherine berg and you're watching the el paso physician [Music] look we have these sidebar conversations i didn't tell the doctors i could go silent for a second while there's more of the opening so my apologies for that um again welcome back we are doing a special program on the el paso physician this evening and uh with me this evening we have dr louis munoz who is a who is the chief of pediatrics at memorial at the at the campus memorial for hospitals of providence and then we have dr peter cantina and he is the medical director and department chair of family medicine for the texas tech physicians at the hospitals of providence at trans mountain campus that's a mouthful but i wanted to make sure i got that right and if i didn't by all means as you guys are introducing uh yourselves and talking about yourselves throw that in there but on that note i would like to uh first start and dr continue i'm going to start with you first because it's just easier for me i'm so used to going to my right if that makes sense if you can describe what you do all day every day um and i know it's it's a lot we could sit here for four or five hours but in relation to what we're talking about this evening so we're talking about getting the good old-fashioned flu shot and i know that there's a lot of things that that come into the way but as you being a medical director um how how are you navigating your days these days so it's very important that our patients understand how we're trying to fight an illness that has symptoms very similar to the covet right and so if we get our patients to understand why it's so important that these two diseases can co-mix and why it's important for them to get vaccinated and do the other preventive measures we can try to make sure that we suppress or mitigate all the uh bad effects that can occur if people get influenza and covid simultaneously exactly because these illnesses not only can cause the respiratory symptoms but they can cause symptoms that occur in other organs of the body they can make heart failure worse they can make diabetes worse and so this ends up making people have to go to the hospital and right now hospitals are pretty full with covered patients and so we want to try to keep people out of the hospital so getting that word out and i'm so thankful for being here tonight because this is so important and so necessary that patients understand that we have to try to do the kind of measures that are going to protect them exactly and i know that in the media you often hear underlying conditions right people who have passed because they've had underlying conditions and you were talking specifically about it's a protection against the flu but really it gets complicated by all the other stuff that people have going on in their bodies so beautifully explained uh dr menos you are the pediatrician on the panel although we're going to be answering questions all over the place but that seems also to be such a question right now in the world of coveted vaccines but we were talking right before the show we're talking about flu vaccines it's six months and above so if you can kind of describe to the audience as well kind of echoing what uh what uh dr cannonel cantonella was talking about what is it that is engulfing your days right now you know and i i want to reinforce uh what we were saying about the the flu and the kobe because we don't have we don't want to have a patient with kobe and flu at the same time especially in in chronic patients and in in patients with underlying conditions and especially the little ones the patients less than two years the little ones so we were telling parents since uh i mean every year that they need to do the flu shot every every year and like we were mentioning the uh we don't want patients in the hospital since they're overcrowded exactly exactly so it's really really important for parents to understand that the flu shot is really important especially right now with the pandemic exactly and if we could i know it's a little bit further down in some of the questions that we have put together and dr cantonella if we can describe the best of our ability so coven 19 and this is something i like to talk about a lot covet 19 kind of appeared to us in 2019. so there have been 18 years prior that kovit's been around it just that the 19 one was just mean and just a sucker right so um we're looking at dealing with that but the virus of the flu virus versus the cobit 19 virus and the reason i want to bring this up people like well if i have the covet 19 vaccination i don't need the flu vaccination and vice versa if you can describe why they're different and why there are two different vaccines sure so my analogy is uh you could have a car that's a buick and a car that's a um chevy and they're both cars and they look very similar but they're still different cars and same thing here with the viruses there are many different types of viruses and each virus has its own unique structure and its own unique genetics and so what we have to understand is what we're trying to do is give the body by building its immune system think of it as we're trying to create in each individual sort of a reserve protection army so that if they ever get exposed to the actual virus their body has an immediate defense mechanism in play to try to fight it off and that can help prevent hospitalization and that can help prevent death now what confuses i think a lot of people is when you get the vaccine your body initially thinks it's the actual virus he's getting but it's not and so it generates an immune response and it's that immune response which can cause things like achiness and and muscle sores and maybe some fever but we expect that to happen because that's the vaccine actually working eggs i'm so so happy in fact i would like you to expand on that that was one of my favorite explanations when we were talking about this when people in the old days when i say old days pre-covered well i don't want to get the flu shot because then i it makes me sick right well you know again it's try it's getting your body to fight it off so you might feel a little icky a day or two afterwards if you could reiterate why that happens and why physiologically it's really good that your body's feeling a little achy breaky after a vaccine so if you think of these viruses that they have these different hair cells if you would on their surface okay just like if you look at a cat every care's hat is a little bit different right so every virus has these hair cells and they're what we call surface antigens and those are the things that actually cause the virus to bond to the human cells right okay nicely explained yes what we want to do is pluck some of those surface antigens off the virus and we inject those into the body okay and so your body looks at that and says oh my gosh there's an influenza virus it's going to attack one of our cells we have to do something about it and so it generates that immune response by producing antibodies and then something we call memory t cells and this is your body this is your body doing it way the magic that our body works wonderful immune system okay which is very protective once those cells are created and they realize whoops there really wasn't a full infection here they kind of go dormant but they're still there and it usually takes a full two weeks for that whole process to become active then if you get exposed to the actual influenza virus or any virus where we have a vaccination because you already have that cell lineage available your body doesn't have to take two weeks to try to generate another immune response you know what expand on that i love that you said that because and i say this there was the first vaccine and we're going to talk about cova just for a second because that's the combination here the first vaccine and then you wait a month for the second vaccine and then there was the idea that you had to wait eight months but now six months and again and the reason i put in the opening that this is a science it's all we're trying to figure it out so we don't have all the perfect answers but when you were talking about that two-week time span when you get a flu vaccine and or a covid vaccine for your body and i know it's a little bit different for every person physiologically your body takes about two weeks you're saying where does the month come in before you get the second vaccine um do you i i know what i'm trying to ask i'm not i'm not okay so let me see if i have it think um the two-week period is important because if people get exposed to the actual virus within that two weeks right they still may come down with influenza or whatever the symptom of the virus is because your body hasn't completely activated everything that's the main issue now in terms of when do we recommend getting boosters a lot of that is dependent upon the science and the trials to be able to figure out at what point is the immune system then really waning and then we have to give it that extra little boost the other thing that i think confuses people is that we do recommend annual influenza vaccinations here's why every year we try to predict what next year's influenza virus is going to look like because there are different types right and so by getting each year you're building a newer variety of those memory t cells that will help protect you because it may come in as a virus and the memory cells that you had from last year kind of go well it looks familiar but maybe it really isn't and so you don't get that same response and so each year that you get the vaccination flu influenza your body is building more and more of these defense mechanisms so i can almost and correct me if i'm wrong because i'm trying to to listen to how you're saying it so taking that idea with the flu changing a little bit every year covid19 we're calling them variants we're calling mutations is it along the same line of what we're speaking about which is when we talk about the variance and now this new one yes where does that mutation how how does the mutation happen and again feel free to speak with each other mutations happen when a patient is infected and then pass is passing the virus to somebody else virus they they behave different depending on the virus we know the influenza mutate the mutations are really fast so every year is a different type of fluid that's why we need to have a flu vaccine every every year exactly well it's it's a little bit different i mean it's happening because there's people getting infected uh and also a lot of people they're not vaccinated yet so that promote the uh the virus to continue mutating uh but uh you know going back to the flu uh vaccine what i explained my my patients is it's a dead virus right so they don't get the repeat yeah it's a dead water so they don't get the flu whenever they have the flu shot and uh it's i explain my parents it's like getting the uh tetanus shot you don't you don't have tetanus when you have the the tetanus so they need to understand that the the flu shot i mean it's a dead virus so they're not getting infected with the flu but it's helping their body recognize it and having that memory the body work by memory so when the body is exposed to the virus to the real virus then the body recognize that virus and uh but uh but you don't get that flu whenever you get the uh the pollution and i think that's one of the biggest myths you know yes you may feel a little yucky but there's a reason for it and physiologically your body is reacting to what it needs to do to uh effectively fight something off later and the more that you get these the better your immune system is the older you get so i i'm a fan of the flu shot i think every since i'm 54 i think since it was like hey get the flu shot i'm a big public health fan and i and i have to say i don't know when the last time was that i really was sick you know respiratory you know maybe had a minor cold here and there and i attribute it to that you know some people uh but i i am a believer in this well the other piece to that is um you have a lot of people that will say well if i one year i got the flu shot and i still came down with that yes and so i say to them are you still alive bingo and they say yes i say then it worked agreed and that too covid you know because there are uh the anti-vaxxers what have you will say well so-and-so had two shots and a booster and they still got coveted and you're absolutely right are they still alive how bad was their infection were they hospitalized did they get put on respite respirators so it does make a big difference it's helping the body fight and the key thing here is even with all our medicines and it really i think it takes place with no matter what disease you're talking about what we're trying to do is supplement the body's ability to heal itself yes and so when we give these vaccines what we're trying to do is is is that supplementation if you would it still requires the body to eventually rid itself of whatever it is right and so if people aren't taking care of themselves and not managing their diabetes they're not managing their high blood pressure their body is already in an inflammatory state it's much harder for their body to fight off these very virulent type of infections perhaps even with a vaccine because their body is already having trouble mounting a full immune response so the best thing that people can do is not only get the vaccinations but adopt as much as possible a very healthy lifestyle exactly you know i tell my patients i've been a pediatrician for almost 25 years so uh when i started doing my pediatric residency we started giving patients the emotional influence of vaccine and no more cocoa vaccine which is a bacterial infection that may cause meningitis or and we haven't talked about that i know this is flu vaccine but feel free to discuss that as well just one two is blamed in that when i was on call uh i have at least one or two patients every time i was on call with meningitis obviously they have complications they some of them die mental retardation deafness we don't see it anymore and we don't see it because we have vaccines and i want people understand that vaccines are make a big change in in public health and we see it in the hospital we see it in pediatric patients we see it in adults so uh vaccines are something that really changed the uh the world in in in illnesses i'm in complete agreement i am going to um ask dr cantonella i know we've got three slides to show and what i'd like to do because you are the expert again earlier trust the experts when we're speaking about something you think it's appropriate for us to show one of these slides let me know and in the meantime um i'm going to ask dr munoz because again pediatrician six months old and older for flu vaccine and if we could let's discuss a little bit now about what we're hearing about vaccinations for kovid and kids you know how it was going on these stair steps and why is it that there's stair steps and the research that's going with that the amount etc just to explain to the public that's not you know a three minute media show but from an actual doctor we started giving the vaccines to phi and umber like three weeks ago it's pfizer vaccine it's the only one that is approved right now it's the dosage is different the dose is one-third of what we're doing in 12 and over gotcha um the patient i mean the study worked like a 2200 patients approximately in the 5 to 11. they didn't have complications major complications i mean there were body aches headaches fever they have sometimes adenopetis but no major major complications um so far that the patients that we vaccinated they haven't had any any issues nice that i know okay myocarditis was one of the concerns that a lot of the uh parents have uh but uh we've seen less cases right now of uh myocarditis with the uh and these and describe what that is for people myocarditis is inflammation of the heart uh we we saw it in patients between 18 to 24 that have the vaccine especially the second second after the second one in [Music] especially in males but uh in the age group that we have right now filed to 11 we haven't seen uh so far cases of myocarditis okay and with myocarditis what are and let's talk worst case scenario because i think people want to hear that so that the breath comes in after that it's like okay you know we there are some cases but there really haven't been true major complications deaths you know et cetera and i the reason i say that is i want to make sure that the debunkedness of a lot of these myths i feel like that's our job this evening right we're looking at what the real science is and i know people are tired of hearing the science i get it i respect it i really do um but that's one of the reasons that we're here um and i'm going to go down to dr cantonella and thank you again for this and gracie we're going to pull up a slide just giving you a warning i think there's a couple of points to make from these slides that's important for the audience to understand and the first slide demonstrates a picture of the united states and you can see a lot of the united states is in green because that means there's a low amount of influenza at this time and that's usually the case at this point but there's one state that isn't and that's new mexico i noticed that and that's our next door neighbor right there that's our next door neighbor and then if you go to the second slide and then just take there we go good job good job you can see here a distribution within texas but our el paso region is right next to that new mexico and so we're more affected by what goes west to east than we are east to west yes sir and yes with new mexico having a much higher rate than other surrounding areas that could really impact us and another reason why we think it's so important for el pasoans to take seriously getting their flu vaccinations and this is and i don't know if this is a question that you're able to answer but maybe best guess why would it be that new mexico is a bit higher when we're looking at that first slide that new mexico is there is there and again i'm asking you an unfair question you may not know but what do you think that might be you know i don't have the exact answer behind that right um but i do know they're also having some uh a large amount of covid at the same time as well and so these are elements that work together and if the third slide helps i think emphasize another point and that is the preventive measures that we put in place for covid are also preventive measures to help limit influenza and so right now while we only have 800 cases again it's early sometimes we peak in january and february rather than december and so we could have 13 000 cases again or fourteen thousand or twenty thousand we will not know but because of our geographic location and everything we are at risk of perhaps having a larger number of cases and so if we take wearing a mask if we take doing a lot of hand washing really seriously um those are the kind of things with the vaccination that could help limit the number of cases that we have nice and and i'm glad that we haven't if we could um the slides i know we're looking at this is the beginning of flu season in my head i always think flu shot you got to get it in october you know this year i got it unfortunately in november i thought oh i just i just didn't get around to it shame on me truly um but when people think flu season i think they think it's around christmas time but it really starts hitting in the beginning of the spring and or for us i mean it's it's kind of the winter but in el paso um flu vaccines i know it's it's a little bit different here we've been doing when i say we i feel like el paso and our region have been doing relatively well on the coveted vaccines and high five to everyone in the medical community and i remember last december we had various people from different uh hospital organizations and they were talking about okay this is how we're gonna disseminate this is how we are teaming up and getting our vaccines the covered vaccines out to our city and we i'm not going to cuss because it's pbs but we kicked button took names when it came to that when we were looking at national numbers on who in the global area fine but in america who was doing really well we were doing really really well so again high five to anyone that was out there in the medical world i would love to if we could talk about why that was possible and what i want to do is the american heart association is is underwriting this program so i can say this with all hospital systems the teamwork that was in play both of you work with hospitals of providence um you and sam was in there we had we had everyone really involved how was that different here than in other places where the dissemination of the vaccine was not well and and i would love for both of you to jump in on it because this is where we can do a rah-rah for el paso yeah it was amazing the community response um i i think the uh huge outbreak that we had in december of last year i think really frightened a lot of us obviously those of us in the front lines we were dealing with you know patients doubled up in rooms and and it was just an awful tragedy of what we had to live through and we really don't want to live through that again right we really don't want to see the hospitals unable to take patients with heart attacks or strokes or people even afraid to go to the hospital with those potential symptoms because they think oh my god there's so much covet out there so i i applaud our community for the efforts that it took and i think we're one of the top five uh cities in the country with our positive vaccination rates but we're not at 100 right exactly and uh i don't think we ever will be but we'd like to and the reason i'm doing this is talking about how positive it was and jenny who's sitting over in the corner i feel like she should actually come behind me and wave because when i was getting my second vaccine i remember just everyone at the hospital i went to i won't describe but it was amazing the precision and you go here we're gonna fill this out everyone was on and you were in and out of there in 20 minutes and it could not have been a more pleasant experience to get a shot in your arm and i and i mean that with the utmost respect and honestly uh love for our community so if you haven't done it yet go do it and i know boosters right now um i did mine through the city on this one and again it is streamlined and you make an appointment or not i showed up because i was going on a trip and i showed up at the civic center and boom it's there el pasostrong.org el pasostrong.com can show where all the sites are i don't have that phone number right now and i don't want to give out the phone number because i know there's so many there but if you go to ep strong where el paso's drawing i think both of them go to that same site and get you there and if you have another place to send people to you my third one uh there and it was really easy to schedule my my appointment and on that note when you're talking about scheduling so let's now move back to the flu shot to schedule a flu shot let's say somebody does not have a doctor that they go to all the time we can talk about cvs walgreens walmart albertsons how would you uh direct people who are watching right now where you should get their flu shot and how do they do that pediatricians we do it normally in the in the office because the cdas or the pharmacies sometimes they don't do it in little ones but uh pediatricians we have old all the pediatricians they have flu vaccines available i mean i have a plenty right now and uh so it's just the people to go and and call the physician they don't need to make the appointment most of the time they can just go and have the uh the immunization uh without any appointment so for for pediatric patients call the pediatricians and and have the vaccine okay and similarly the family physicians in the community also are providing for both children and adults the vaccinations um so that's another avenue for people who have a family physician available to them but it's it's imperative that people really understand how important this is for our community right and you may not know this and i should have looked at this before coming on the air but the clinics that we have around town i know that with the students there's uh the sparks clinic kind of nickname at the sparks clinic the rotary uh roticare clinic all this too i'm assuming that there's vaccines there if there's a question again go to ep strong or you can call the el paso county medical society because they will know my apologies for not having that ahead of time but there's also a couple of places here um that are health services places that this is from a different program but there's also information here with cdc you can just look up cdc in search engines you can look at the department of health and sciences for texas and when you look at search engines and i know this sounds a little bit strange but you can doctor google yourself to death and if you find an organization that has dot org versus dot com most the time that's the better place to look versus versus.com.com is usually for profit or whatever but if you're looking at something and you've got you know a myriad of websites to choose from go to the org website that's usually the non-profit and or more medical in those ways um dr cantonella i'd like to ask you this we talked a little bit about when people get their vaccine and they feel a little bit odd fine but when people do get the flu full-blown whether they're vaccinated or not what are some of the treatments out there um you know a lot of people like go home for a couple of days sometimes it get worse it gets worse where do you go when somebody gets really truly excellent and again the confusion here is a lot of the symptoms of influenza mimic the symptoms of covid yes so what i always think is important is to call your physician and discuss what your symptoms are so that the appropriate testing can be done because we can immediately do tests that'll say it's influenza or we can determine if it's coveted right and that's important because there are medicines that are available to help people with influenza but they're best given within the first 48 hours of symptom development and that's symptom development of symptoms right and so by getting the appropriate testing done we can then do the appropriate treatment and another piece to this that's important is once we've diagnosed somebody within the household that has influenza we may want to take care of other household contacts so suppose grandma has diabetes and heart disease and kidney disease we would want to do some prophylactic measures to help grandma because someone in the family got influenza um here's the hard question too dr minos and let's just say mom comes in and she has a two-year-old coughing wheezing is it a cold is it the flu is it coveted and like you said the testing right and i'm just thinking right now when you have a little person and sometimes it takes a couple of days for you think oh is it bad enough to go to the doctor or is this just going to go away yes and that's a big question yes uh what i tell my patients is uh whenever they have fever if the they're doing well they don't have major symptoms they can wait a little bit longer maybe 24 hours 48 hours if they're acting normal and they don't have any respiratory problems breathing problems but uh i explained my patients that if they're high raised and let me explain you about what is high rates and pediatric patients that's a good point we haven't talked about that yet especially we see high risk in patients less than two years especially uh well less than than five years but especially the ones less than two years patients who has chronic conditions like an asthma or heart disease or patients who has several policies for example or mental retardation they're they're high risk patients so if that happened to those patients they need to be seen right away because like we mentioned we have a window 48 hours for the treatment and we have the tools to diagnose those patients in the office normally we have a patient a two-year-old who has wheezing and caffeine and fever it can be you know a lot of different viruses yeah rsp is one of them that we see in pediatric patients normally flew the symptoms that we have in pediatric patients it's the main one as a fever that happened suddenly right in a patient that was not sick and that follow respiratory symptoms such as runny nose coughing and the patient they look sick they may have vomiting they have a diarrhea they may have myalgias which is body aches [Music] but we have the tools to diagnose we can do the rsb in the office chase we can do the the influenza and i normally do the pcr of the of the cobit takes a little bit longer to have the results but it's more more sensitive okay but uh in this time that we have covic and we have different uh infections we recommend the the parents not to wait too long to contact the pediatrician and uh and they can be seen right away it will be better nice and as dr cantonella said too seen right away and then get the the i guess antiviral medications is that the best way to describe it at this point um and how that's the question too so once diagnosed with the flu and say now you're a weekend so i know it's great to get it within the first two days i know me i'll sit there for two or three or four or five days and i shouldn't say that out loud but it's true i'll kind of wait for it to go away oh you're human ah right it's like i know and i'm doing the show but if you are a good week into your flu and now you're like okay now i'm going to go the doctor are anto antivirals still introduced at that point they you know they just not work as well what would the treatment be if you did wait a little bit too long to go so a lot depends upon the situation in terms of are you someone who's at high risk as was described so if you're 65 and older living in a nursing home you have kidney disease asthma emphysema it might be a doctor's choice to try to give some therapy at that point to help prevent a hospitalization from happening but in general if the medication is given after 48 hours in otherwise healthy individuals you're not really going to limit the amount of duration or severity of the symptoms all that much okay and like you said it's for the antiviral it's the duration that you're trying to in the symptoms so it's not like it's gonna go away it's just that you're gonna feel a little bit not as bad exactly okay a question here from the audience and sarah again we've got sarah i want to make sure i get your last name correct again so we have uh sarah lynn decker who is a third year medical student and again she's from laredo she just took a question from the audience and i'm not being rude i'm actually getting these on my phones i know you guys like why does she keep looking at her phone that's how the questions are coming in so it said and again we don't really have the information right here but we can do our best guesstimate that we have with our experts on the show we showed statistics for new mexico and el paso et cetera and all of that just included america but we are on the board of juarez and the question is might we know what the infection rate is there and we may not at this point but i also would like to talk about the vaccination rate in juarez because we did just open up borders two weeks ago to not essential travel um and i'm throwing that to either one of you who wants to take it um and again we don't we don't always know the answer and so uh we do the best that we can with what we've got so in juarez what is going on right now if uh if we know um i know they're getting better and vaccination but i don't know the uh percentage of the uh i don't know the exact percentage but my recall is that it's usually lower than it is here and so that's another element of potential risk for us right especially with the borders being open and um this is a question that i will answer maybe the next time we have a show i can talk about it but juarez residents are they able to come over and get vaccinations here yes so let's talk about that then so people who might be watching the show this evening who have family members in juarez who may not have easy access to kidding vaccinations there how does that process work yeah my understanding is not they're not asking for i mean social security i wasn't asked just to fill out this paperwork come in i agree i agree because it's for the greater good thing they're asking for for anything uh whoever goes and needs a vaccine i think they can get it and it's important for us because i mean our economy also moves from the people coming from from juarez and if they're get getting vaccinated it will help also el paso absolutely control the cases and and the economy will be uh better absolutely and the nice thing too is yes another way of looking at this is um all of us get in a car and drive the risk of getting into a car accident i think is like one in a hundred and we don't think of it that way right and more important when we're driving we're confident about ourselves but how many times we might get into an accident because of somebody else's behavior so it's very similar with these kind of illnesses you may feel like you're doing everything right but you may become exposed to somebody else who isn't and that puts you at risk of injury or harm right and so this is why it's important we look at this as a community situation not necessarily as an individual one exactly and so when we're talking about again we have such a family community here i'm talking about people who live in el paso also have family in juarez fine people in el paso also have family in new mexico which goes to the point that you were talking about going back and forth so anytime that we can get the entire family the whole everyone in the car everyone in the station wagon and or the mommy mobile vaccinated the better off everybody's gonna be um i would like to talk a little bit just because it's front of mind and everybody is talking about right now what we might know and i know it's not a lot what we might know of the omicron variant is that the correct way of calling it and when we are talking about the boosters people that have both vaccines and the boosters and again we're still figuring it out and i want everybody to know that too we don't have real specific answers but the best of what we're seeing right now is with the vaccine and let's talk about all of us on this table we both have we all have two vaccines and our booster we've got this new variant now it's coming it's coming to america um and there may be another variant as it as it comes to let's talk about vaccines what you were talking about earlier of the mixture of diabetes and this and the other what our bodies are doing with these antibodies that we're putting in with both flu and covid where where do you see us going so first off let me be clear too that it's okay to get both vaccines at the same time yes and what we would do is uh inject one and one arm and one on another arm or different locations because one of the things i hear from people as well i can't get him at the same time and the answer is yes you actually can yes it's safe to be you know what repeat that a couple of times because you're so right about that now for the influenza if people have coveted symptoms that are moderate to severe then we might delay giving that person a flu vaccination until their symptoms are resolved and and they're doing better but mild symptoms it's okay to get the influenza vaccination okay that's an excellent point so they do the same with the pediatric patients uh if they're have a severe illness obviously we don't do the flu shot at that time but if they have mild symptoms they can get it because they have a lot of the patients that they don't want to go because the baby has runny nose so here's that question so we're saying mild symptoms define what that is versus my symptoms is like a common cold when you have a runny nose you don't have high fever they're eating well they're not dehydrated uh and they don't feel sick obviously the flu it's it's a little more severe uh symptoms with high temperatures and and other and other symptoms but for me mild symptoms is basically a common cold that is uh okay uh not having an impact on that patient so if i were to try to simplify it which i know is dangerous sometimes would it be the presence of a fever versus it's not necessarily it's how high the fever is so okay you know if you're running a degree or so above your normal usual um that's fine but you're not um at a point where you're running like a 102 or 103 degree fever you're not nauseous you're not throwing up you you still feel like eating um you may have a little bit of muscle aches and pains but it's not preventing you from wanting to do anything okay so it's it's more along that lines for both adults and children we really talked about something that that is within that mild but moderate to severe now you're starting to feel like i'm going to stay in bed all day i'm going to call in sick um kind of a deal now what we do say is if people are getting symptoms that are in that ballpark it might be best to uh quarantine until you know exactly what's going on we have not talked about quarantine great point yourself isolate no you're right quarantine is that that is a negative connotation that is such an excellent point um again i was talking i i did travel to germany my family's all over there and there really was i went with my children and we really did self-isolate prior to going and then upon returning and again different countries are doing different things everywhere we went we had to show vaccination cards uh prior to going we had to show two different tests showing that we were negative et cetera et cetera i like that you're talking about that so people who are in multi-family or multi-generation households i'm looking at you because i'm thinking you and babies and children right but often grandma and grandpa come around a lot too because they always want to be around the babies and children that's right um so when we're looking at that issue what is the advice because we're kind of at a like a 13 minute point right now before the show ends what is the advice and i'd like to hear from either one of you with that and dr cantonella i'll have you go first and again feel free to hop on too so if someone has you know fevers muscle aches and pains they're not wanting to eat um their fatigue level is there those are symptoms that could suggest either influenza or covet and so until we can prove which one it is i think precaution again to help prevent spread across the community is a good thing to do and so calling in sick and isolating yourself until you know you could get the appropriate testing done either to call your physician um or or go to one of the uh testing sites for covid so that first you know that that's negative and then you can get tested also simultaneously for influenza now we know what's going on and we can take the appropriate measures so that you can get back to work sooner than later and it really is uh for the fellow man right or for your fellow woman man whatever um don't don't call me get mad it's it's uh and if you can take this on too because again multi-generational it's hard to isolate and i get it there's mom and dad who might be working mom or dad that might be working babies do still have to go to school when i say babies anyone prior to you know the age of after high school so that's still a thing um so you kind of do the best to your ability of isolating and this is where mass still come in right i know that mandates not mandates i do not want to get political at all that's not what the show is about but if you're looking at multi-general multi multi-generation households and you still have someone that has to go to work and you still have kids that have to go to school what would your advice be there if that's something they have to do well they need to remember with we're on an epandemic right now and they need to understand it's at different times and so we need to respect the other people in the community so they don't get sick uh so they have symptoms fevers body aches uh like they mimic either influenza or kobet they need to be tested right before uh i mean and isolate and they need to remember that we need uh to use the mass watch our hands all the time as much as we can you know simple things that we as a physicians do it you know every day in the in the office for for many years but uh this is a different time and this is uh uh we need to i mean make sure that the other people they don't get infected there's another purpose here and there's this phenomenon called presentism where you know you know you're sick but you go to work anyway and and the problem with that is um if your sickness gets to a certain point we may not be able to treat you as easily and so you think you're going to work and you're getting an extra day or two but if your illness progresses to a certain point i mean particularly with covid we've had patients in the hospital for months and so you don't want to get to that point we want to prevent that from happening and that early detection and early potential treatment so particularly with covid somebody might qualify for the monoclonal antibody medication and so knowing that sooner describe what that is so basically it's a medication where um we're trying to help give antibodies to try to coat the virus so that your body can get rid of it and and this is a therapeutic this is once you've already been diagnosed you're now getting diagnosed mild symptoms not necessarily needing any oxygen support gotcha okay okay for covid specifically for coving exactly uh question here from the audience thank you sarah um are the contents of the booster vaccination the same of what the first two vaccinations were question to the audience so yeah they're the same they're the same and and if we could dr canton i think that you described dr cantonella how again your body is trying to activate that so people who weren't around the beginning of the show if you can redescribe what it is physiologically your body's doing when it gets a vaccine so if you think of a virus as sort of a tennis ball with these hairs on the end what we try to do is the hairs on the end are what the body is going to initially recognize as oh this is a foreign object and we got to do something about it and so when we give vaccinations we're trying basically to give those hairs so that's the point that we're not really giving somebody the entire tennis ball of the virus so they're not getting the actual live virus itself we're giving this component of the virus so the body begins to recognize that this is something foreign then it develops antibodies and it develops an immune response and it's that immune response that causes people to feel perhaps ill they might get a little fever soreness muscle aches and pains and fatigue those symptoms at that point do represent the body creating the response that's necessary so that you have protection and i want to say that i don't want to emphasize that because that means your body's doing what it's supposed to be doing because i hear the negatives of that right but it means your body is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing in regards of getting the vaccine correct okay and again i i just want to throw that in there because i feel like that's the one thing people i don't want to get sick i don't want to feel bad uh keep going sorry i interrupted you so so when we do this then the body creates sort of this reserve unit ready for attack if your body does get the actual virus so it's not necessarily preventing you from coming down with something but what it is doing is helping to mitigate the severity of what you might get now some cases it helps prevent it completely and other times it might mean that you're not going to get hospitalized or you won't die from it and so those are the things that really matter more than anything else and we know that when people get vaccinated their chance of having to be hospitalized for pneumonia or encephalitis which is a brain infection from influenza cardiac infection from influenza those are the things that get reduced as risk when you get vaccinated i'm glad that you talked about that because people um i think sometimes especially in this time of covid well the flu is just the flu but a lot of people die of the flu because of exactly the reasons that you're talking about as well um sometimes up to 60 000 people a year will die of influenza particularly elderly patients 65 and older or the younger patients or the younger people or the younger patients and and that's actually perfect transition to you dr munoz because again when we're looking at underlying and or young they're little you know there's not that immunity in them yet so talk a little bit about that and why it's important for little ones to get the vaccinations well the immune system is not the same like in older children so their response to the to the virus the same way uh uncomplicated uh flu it's i mean fevers by the eggs uh coughing runny nose but complicated flu that happen in high risk patients especially like the ear infection 40 of them they can have ear infection pneumonias encephalitis uh they're not unusual in in pediatric patients uh and uh because like you said most of the people believe that the flu is like a common cold right and it's not um can die because of the flu and people do um i want to respect something we spoke about earlier and we had a caller um that talked about we were we were talking about if people are able to come in to get a vaccination in america if they're from juarez uh the person that was on the loan on the phone uh called and talked about being able to cross without a vaccination card or without a proof of vaccination so i want to address that i'm not quite sure how that works but i didn't want to ignore it either but that's something that that we will look into a little bit more and again if you really have a burning question on that call the el paso county medical society there are people that bring the show to you every month and we will try to figure out what that answer is for you because i really hate leaving people hanging on something like that but thank you so much for calling in and bringing that to our attention and um i will know better next time i come on the air i will research that a little bit so my apologies for that um what i do want to do we only have about five minutes left and i want to see if there's anything that we have not yet covered that we want to throw out there really quick before we wrap up the show just emphasize that the flu is really important i mean they don't i mean covet is important obviously but uh don't forget the flu don't forget the flu a big deal people die yeah get the vaccine as soon as possible we're still on time we don't have that many cases that we see in here but they will come and we're expecting a little more severe flu obviously that last year so they still have time to go and get the vaccine and as we saw in one of the slides we're like 800 now but usually it's like 14 or 15 000. so yeah we've got the time so please do give that to yourself is a holiday gift dr cantonella has anything that you'd like to bring across just another analogy to try to help people understand i remember uh driving in the 70s and no cars had seat belts do you remember that i do i do i'm old enough to remember that yes sir and i remember when there were certain groups that would say well i'm not going to have a car with the seat belt that's affecting you know sort of my choice and yet today everybody has a car with not only with a seatbelt but an airbag why because we've learned over time that provides protection it saves lives exactly and that's what we're talking about trying to do with these vaccinations save lives we don't worry about polo polio anymore we don't worry about smallpox or hiv i mean think about you know the the days of aids and where we have my gosh 85 i want to say i feel like 80s 80s is where that was and yeah we are 40 years out and now that's almost because of science because of science and and to respect too like we said in the opening people are upset because we don't have all the answers we're not going to for quite some time but we're working on it it's messy it is messy but we keep trying it um if you're ever and this is across all shows that we do if you're ever in my opinion in a position where you can be part of a clinical trial i think that's one of the greatest gifts that you can give to your your fellow man i know i'm using that same word again um but that matters uh we have less than two minutes so i don't really feel like we have the time that uh gets another question but i do want to talk about uh the virus that's consistently changing when i see the virus i'm talking about flu virus and also covid they are two very different viruses getting one shot does not mean that you're protected from the other uh this show is all about getting your influenza shot you're getting your your flu vaccination but at the same time we do want to urge people if you have not received your covert vaccination again not political but if you do want to look at science it is out there it's hard because the timing of how to have answers is just that there are scientists working day and night trying to get this going so um we're not here to tell you what to do i i am aware of that but there is for sure the science that we've seen in the last two years that shows that death and hospitalizations are reduced immensely when it comes to that i want to say thank you again to the american heart association for underwriting this program i want to say thanks to jenny that helps out with the hospitals of providence that provided some help and thank you both for getting here i know sometimes it's not easy to physically find this place so that in and of itself is a good thing um i want to say thank you to the el paso county medical society and if you want to watch this program again you can watch it on pbselpaso.org or you can watch it on the el paso county medical society's website and that is epcms just think about the acronym and that one is a.com but you'll be able to see the show again starting on monday and sometimes we go so fast that it's easier to do that later i appreciate you watching i'm catherine berg and this has been the el paso position [Music] [Music] you