Assuming one can get to this point, what exactly makes someone non-cantageous? How does one really know they’ve gotten to this point?
I certainly would like this answer too. I got my flu shot, as usual, and for the past couple of weeks I have had a horrible case of the flu. I have been avoiding getting closer than a few feet to anyone hoping to avoid spreading it.
Per the experts at UpToDate:
Take that for what it’s worth. But if you still have symptoms, particularly coughing and excessive secretion production, you may still be contagious.
Oh crap, I was around persons 5 or 6 days ago they were well, now one has confirmed flu. Another is ill.
I assume I am coming down with something. I have scratchy throat. Tamiflu is scarce in these parts. Just my luck.
The excessive coughing is the worst part of this. I have been to my doctor twice. Each time he has prescribed Codeine cough syrup. This guy obviously doesn’t do the math. A prescription is 100ml. The dosage is 10ml every 4 to 6 hours. using the 6 hour interval, this gives me codeine for 60 hours or 2 1/2 days. If there was a chance that the cough will be cured in that amount of time, this would be all well and good. I have had this cough for more than three weeks.
I would bet cash money that if my doctor was sleeping on the couch so his never ending cough won’t keep his wife awake, he would come up with something to stop the cough…
If I was your doc, you’d lose. I avoid opioids and ride it out. No fun, but there it is. For the cough of influenza, nothing but opioids really help.
And I suspect your Rx says “take if needed for cough”. When I do prescribe codeine for horrible coughs, I tell my patients they can take it up to 4 x a day, but it won’t last long that way. Save it for the horrible cough that won’t let you sleep.
I agree. The codeine I got (two prescriptions a couple of weeks apart) was used sparingly so we could sleep. that was all gone last Thursday. I have been toughing it out since, but I am pretty tired of the cough.
“Flu” is short for “influenza di stelle”, so check your horoscope to find out.
You can’t. My mother has gone down with it for the second time.
I had to take my wife to the doctor for flu and asked the exact same question. The doctor said that after you get the flu as long as you don’t have a fever you’re no contagious. That makes sense since a fever if your body’s way of fighting off an infection. No fever after you have been sick means no infection and you’re no longer contagious. Note you could be contagious before you get a fever at the beginning of the infection.
Sadly that doc is incorrect. Absence of fever is no sure indicator of lack of infectiousness for both colds and influenza. Viral shedding is seen in many patients who are not running fevers.
Your immune system eventually destroys the virus and once that happens you’re no longer contagious. Symptoms persist because of the physical damage the virus and your immune system has done. So there’s some time while you’re still sick but the virus is out of your system. We know that is typically a week or so. That doesn’t mean everyone in every situation is no longer contagious. The only way to do that would be to test saliva or other fluids.
One year when I had the flu, the HR person in our office told me (over the phone) that I could return to work when I had gone 24 hours without a fever.
Qadgop the Mercotan, a question I’ve always had with the viral shedding and contagion risk question is what degree of viral shedding is clinically significant? The issue is not just if the virus is in the nasopharyngeal secretions but also how likely those secretions are to reach others (hence more forceful coughs and sneezes associate with greater contagion risk).
In any case my FWIW contribution:
Yeah - when I have bronchitis or whatever, I’ve been given The Good Stuff but cautioned not to use it :D. Because if you’ve got a productive cough, you don’t want to suppress it (that way, I gather, lies pneumonia). But I’ve gotten it a handful of times when the coughing was truly intractable and severely interfering with my sleep, and told that I was to use it just for that purpose (and to tough it out during the day).
Though if I ever get bronchitis as badly as I did in 2016, I may whine and ask for more… the coughing was so severe it was aggravating a normally-quiescent disc problem (which of course made coughing agony), and I think tore a muscle in my side that still twinges now and then.
In my case I was actually given a script for codeine when I didn’t ask for it, which may be the trick (as well as being an established patient of that doctor with a history of asthma / bronchitis, and no history of opioid issues). Also QtM deals with a rather different patient population than my suburban internist’s practice, and they are higher risk for abuse issues.
Back to the OP: I imagine that once it’s all over but for the lingering cough, contagion is no longer an issue. And you sound horrible to everyone around, which doubtless causes them to give you a wide berth, which further reduces the risk!
Not by at much as most people think, though.
Excellent question; I’ve not found any real studies on that.
That’s what our school district tells parents, 24 hours fever free without fever reducing medication.
Can you explain this?
It is odd, because I had that cough. I coughed so hard that I thought I was going to barf, and my abdominal muscles were sore top and bottom. I lost a full night’s sleep to that cough. But as far as I could tell, I was never really feverish or totally wiped out, and I never did barf. It seemed like just a really bad cold, but in my chest, where I rarely get a cold. If I had the flu, half of it was missing.