What confuses me is why is it the American public in particular who seem to be so against the vaccine? Being the one industrial country without a form of government supported healthcare means that getting sick can be financially devastating.
I figure the vaccine is like insurance. The chances of our house being robbed are 1 in hundreds or thousands.... but we have insurance because if we lose that bet the consequences are devastating. The chances of our house burning down are 1 in 100s of thousands or even 1 in a million. But we have that insurance too.
There is a cost to the insurance. It costs money. We could certainly use that money - but we still get the insurance.
To carry the analogy further, we don't buy insurance for every peril. No chance of a hurricane here, or a tornado... so we choose not to get that particular kind.
Most years, I don't get the seasonal flu shot because I'm not one of the vulnerable groups. This year is different. This flu is pandemic - which doesn't necessarily mean more fatal - but does make it more likely you are going to catch it. Also, it appears that this strain is especially hard on younger people.
In Canada the current advice is that the elderly get their regular seasonal flu shot first, because as in most years they will be hard hit by seasonal flu - leaving the the H1N1 flu vaccine for the younger crowd - and that the non-elderly get the H1N1 vaccine first. Once the initial rounds of vaccinations have taken place we all get to swap clinics and the elderly will then get a chance at H1N1 and the rest of us will get a chance at regular seasonal flu shots. Very confusing.
If people choose to not get vaccinated, that is their choice. But please do so for the right reasons, not because of half-baked myths.
One of the fears of the health authorities is that enough people will get seriously ill that emergency departments are overwhelmed with people with the flu.
Just found a stat here, at the US National Centre for Medical Intelligence
What it says -basically, among other things - is that it believes that the infection rate for H1N1 could be 2 to 5 times higher than regular seasonal flu - and could approach 50% of the population contracting H1N1. And that 3%-4% of those people will need hospitalization.
Assume that the fatality rate is similar to regular flu, so that means in the US instead of 36,000 dying it will be 70,000 to 150,000. I found another stat for Chicago on the CDC site that found that just about 2/3s of the people hospitalized were
aged 29 or less. (my emphasis).
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5833a1.htm
Also, that 20% of those hospitalized were put into ICU. Imagine the impact on healthcare for everyone when the hospitals are swamped with flu stricken people. Look at your local hospital... could they deal with a 10% or 20% increase in emergency room intakes, increased demand on ICU beds, etc etc for the many months that a flu season typically runs. In my part of Canada the H1N1 flu season has already started to hit hard. In early September there were no deaths due to H1N1 (in a reporting week) to 63 deaths this past week.
I'm just saying, do some real research before deciding whether the vaccine is good for you or not.
Whoa - too much seriousness. Imagine how good those graphs and charts would look on that 27" iMac! I wish I could come up with one good real reason why I needed it.... sigh.
