Take a trip to your local drug store and read the packages and compare prices. You can probably do much better.

As far as what the government is reporting about the severity of swine flu cases, no matter what their report states with regards to statistics, it doesn’t remove the potential for any individual person to experience a cytokine storm reaction. The potential is still there and very real, and it’s the whole reason why there is a worldwide fuss being made about swine flu in the first place.

Statistically speaking, seasonal flu is usually more severe than what we have seen with this swine flu, but they don’t close down schools when a single student catches seasonal flu. That should tell you all you need to know about the potentially deadly nature of swine flu.

Even if it were 1 in 100,000 people at risk for a severe reaction that could be fatal, would you want to be that 1 person? And what if you are? Do you really want to find out?

Personally, I’d follow the guidelines from the government for prevention and take the vitamin C any way, just in case. It won’t hurt you.

Elderberry (10:1 extract) 180mg
Echinacea (10:1 extract) 120mg
Ascorbic acid (vitamin C) 50mg
Zinc oxide5mg

“H1N1 Influenza 09 (swine flu) is still considered to be a mild illness in most cases. Most people who become unwell with swine flu recover well without the need for medical treatment.

As with seasonal flu however, for some vulnerable people swine flu can cause severe illness which requires hospitalisation, or even death.”

It then states some stats and what to do to help prevent the onset of the flu.

I’ve emailed the company regarding the strength of the ingredients and I will post the reply if I get one.

Pandemic flu, which is what swine flu is, has the potential to kill young healthy people with strong immune systems because it can turn your immune system against yourself in a reaction known as a cytokine storm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm

You wake up feeling fine, start experiencing mild symptoms by the end of the day, and by the next morning you are close to death. If you are lucky you can make it to a hospital in time and they can start serious treatment with antiviral drugs and other drugs to stop the cytokine storm.

If you take at least 1000mg of vitamin C per day, split into multiple doses and taken throughout the day, every day, before you get sick, it is quite possible that if you do catch swine flu and have that violent life threatening reaction to it, the vitamin C might just save your life by preventing fatal tissue damage to your lungs. But it has to be taken every day and just how I said, otherwise there won’t be a high enough concentration in your system to be of any help. It’s a water soluble vitamin and if you take it in a single megadose, you’ll just piss most of it away as soon as you next hit the bathroom.

And the reason why it helps in cytokine storm cases is because vitamin C is a free radical scavenger (aka antioxidant)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_storm#Free_radical_scavengers

Taking vitamin E every day can also help, since it’s also a good antioxidant. And since it’s a fat soluble vitamin, you can get away with a single dose a day.

But you don’t need to buy any fancy over-hyped stuff. You just need the basic vitamins that you can get much cheaper at your local drugstore.

And keep in mind that it still won’t prevent you from catching the flu.

So my conclusion is that it won’t do a damn thing to prevent anything, not colds, flu, or HIV, but if you catch a mild to moderate cold it might help, if what it contains is in high enough concentrations.

Unless you can read the bottle and it tells you how much of everything is in it, you’ll never know. If they don’t list the amounts on the bottle, it is likely it doesn’t contain very much and they are trying to hide that fact.

A lot of these herbal preparations sold online, claiming to be able to do all kinds of things, have about the same medicinal value as a tic tac. Even if they contain things that are known to be able to relieve certain symptoms, they usually don’t put enough in it to do that and it’s still equal to a tic tac.

And you can get a package of tic tacs for less than $1.
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I think their main problem is in their marketing as they’ve relied too much on hype. It would have been a lot better if they kept it more low key and believable.

The facts are that there actually is some evidence that some of the ingredients may be beneficial in preventing and helping in overcoming flu symptoms. I did a quick search on Elderberry extract and apparently there is evidence that that it does fight flu symptoms. Here is just one article on the effectiveness of Elderberry on flu symptoms.

There is also this article from Choice about the effectiveness of Echinacea, while not conclusive makes for interesting reading.

There is probably just as much evidence to the contrary but then that’s true for almost everything. I find it interesting that they actually give a 60 day money back guarantee! I wonder if anyone made use of the offer?

If it happens, Huttriver will be one of the first to know and will tell you all around the blogesphere.
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