What do you think might be in it?

I am a mostly healthy 59 year old with Type II diabetes, controlled with diet and exercise.
Because of this risk factor i was given the current flu vaccine: Seasonal + H1N1. ( don't know whether that is the trivalent vaccine under discussion, and that might not even be germane to my question.

I was vaccinated 9/22. On saturday 9/25, I was exposed to my 22 month old grandson's cold. Yes, Grandma wiped his snotty nose multiple times with no hand washing or sanitation in between. Cold symptoms appeared 9/26 with a scratchy throat , working it's way through a runny nose alternating with breathtaking ( literally ) congestion, body aches, extreme fatigue, hacking coughs and ferocious sneezes. Not much fever. Symptoms have shifted and alternated without any real progress to recovery – it is now Thursday Sept. 30, 2010.

This is the most severe cold i can remember experiencing in several years.

QUESTION: Is it possible that there has been some interaction/ synergy between the cold and the flu vaccine to have exacerbated my misery.
Thanks for taking time to answer.

So is it something intrinsic to influenza? (It's not impossible — for example, noroviruses tend to only induce very short-lived immunity, so this is something that viruses may be able to manipulate a little.) But we do know that anti-flu immunity can last a very long time. Remember the paper a couple years ago that showed immunity in modern survivors of the 1918 flu, 90 years later.

On the third hand (we need a squid to debate this properly), that's not directly comparable, because they weren't measuring the same thing in that study. They were restimulating first and then looking for the memory. In general, detection of long-lasting memory has taken that approach, because antibody titers decay away fairly quickly (unless there's restimulation in vivo) even when memory cells are present. I don't know of studies where that's been done with the flu vaccines (doesn't mean the studies aren't out there, just that I don't know of them) — how much memory is left after the antibody titers wanes, and how recoverable is that memory?

I also don't know how directly comparable the polio studies were — were they picking up circulating antibody in the absence of restimulation (the flu situation) or restimulating in the process and picking up on the memory response from reactivated memory cells?

But yeah, the disruption is probably a big part of it. Better innate triggers from the incorporated RNA and probably virion proteins. Probably better CD4 help as well (particulate material, perhaps including virions, is better phagocytosed and presented on MHC class II for T cell help than is soluble protein). Giving a more potent adjuvant with the flu vaccine (the emulsion that's used in Europe) does lead to a longer-lasting response, as I recall.

The live vaccine for flu is mucosal which tends to have less long-lasting memory in general, though it's not universally true. So I'm guess the short antibody response to the inactivated and the live vaccines are for different reasons.

I also wonder how much impact pre-existing cross-reactive immunity to other flu strains would have. I'd be surprised if there was no effect at all from our annual exposure to different strains, and I'd guess that would tend to reduce the effective dose of the flu vaccine compared to polio, and might lead to amplification of the “wrong” (cross-reactive but non-neutralizing) response.

Mostly guesswork, I'm afraid. Sorry for the stream of consciousness rambling.