Adenoids and illness

This has been a very rough flu/general illness year already for family. In the last 4-6 weeks I've had three unwell "events" occur for myself. In two of these events I found myself feeling very unwell for just a few hours and then I was fine. The most recent one was some odd intestinal cramping for a day. I say odd because I don't think I've ever experienced intestinal cramping before. I assumed it was something I ate but now I'm not so sure.

With in hours of every one of my events, my daughter has become ill. Vomiting, fever, etc. The first two she vomited once and then seemed to be OK. The most recent one doesn't seem to want to pass so quickly.

My son hasn't gotten sick at all. He's a little pissed because she gets to stay home from school every other week and he never does. The difference? He had his adenoids removed a few years ago, she didn't.

If you take a quick spin past the Wikipedia entry for Adenoids, you will notice how little information is there. A wider search reveals that we don't know anything about adenoids. My thinking is that they serve as a in-body petri dish. The good news is that they appear to nearly disappear by 20. Self correcting problems are the best.

Was the purpose intended* to expose children to more bugs early on to help develop the immune system? Or did it evolve* to protect us from something that isn't a problem anymore? Will my son be less able to cope with a serious bug when it comes along?

So far all signs point to the adenoids being a troublesome mass of useless tissue.

Do I bother with flu shots? Seems like we have gone through a lot of bugs already....how many bugs can a flu shot protect from? I thought it was just a single strain.... I'm not really a believer in flu shots in the first place. Likely we'll just pick up a fourth illness from having gotten the shot.

* Look how I straddled the line between intelligent design and evolution.