Sarahp
Jogger
Registered: 01/18/09
Posts: 99
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Reply with quote | #151 |
We just gave about 500 vaccines today at the Health Department in Lebanon--my feet hurt. It's good to know other clinics are getting the vaccine now.
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Sarah |
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Trent
Half Marathon
Registered: 05/09/05
Posts: 2,372
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Reply with quote | #152 |
New York Times, November 10, 2009
Fearing a Flu Vaccine, and Wanting More of It
By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
When I tell nonmedical friends that our clinic is vaccinating children against the H1N1 flu virus, here is what they say.
With about half, it is something like: “Oh, my God, our doctor doesn’t have it! Can you get me a dose?” And with the other half, it is something like, “Oh, my God, that brand-new vaccine — do you really think it’s safe?”
There is a peculiar duality in the collective cultural mind just now, a kind of pandemic doublethink. Other doctors I know are all eagerly having their own children immunized. Many are answering frantic calls from people desperate for the vaccine. But at the same time, we are all coming up against parents who are determined to refuse that same vaccine.
Wondering what history might have to say about this incongruous state of affairs, I called David M. Oshinsky, a professor of history at the University of Texas who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story” (Oxford, 2005). Dr. Oshinsky compared the current vaccination campaign with two previous situations.
In 1947, a man newly arrived in New York City from Mexico died of smallpox. The authorities “lined up the entire city” and vaccinated everyone, even those who had already been vaccinated, Dr. Oshinsky said. “The entire city was revaccinated,” he added, “and there was no real resistance. People had a sense of risk versus reward and listened to public health officials.”
Then there were the polio vaccine trials of 1954, in which parents volunteered more than a million children to receive either an experimental vaccine or a placebo. And while they trusted the medical profession much more than parents do now, there was another factor, Dr. Oshinsky said: “They also had lived through virulent epidemics. That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. You’re dealing with parents who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic.”
Few doctors now practicing have ever seen a single case of smallpox, much less an epidemic (thanks to vaccination). But when pediatricians look at today’s strain of H1N1, we tend to be good and scared.
Serious cases of this flu are relatively rare but far from unheard of; more than 100 children have died of H1N1. The deaths seem to occur disproportionately in children and pregnant women.
So we give the H1N1 vaccine to children whose parents are almost tearfully afraid of the virus, and we try to win over those parents who are just as tearfully afraid of the vaccine. To them, we explain over and over that in fact this is not a brand-new vaccine — it is made with the same techniques as the seasonal influenza vaccine. Yes, it has been tested. Yes, it’s safe. Yes, it’s effective.
“When I gave a discussion to a group of parents at my daughter’s day care,” said my friend Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, the San Francisco public health director, “I counseled parents who were worried about the risks of vaccination to give their children — if healthy — the nasal vaccine, because what don’t our children put up their noses?
“Given the variety of viruses that our children are exposed to through their noses, it’s very hard to imagine how the vaccination could be that different. I think a lot of people were comforted by that.”
Such is the ambivalence out there that some parents who were once scared of getting the vaccine are now scared of not getting it. “I’m still seeing both ends of this dichotomy,” said Dr. John Snyder, a pediatrician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, adding, “It’s a really interesting moment. I can’t recall anything like this before.”
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk in the pediatrics department at Vanderbilt University. Tennessee was hit hard by H1N1 in September and October, before vaccine was available.
“I’ve seen some pretty healthy kids that got sick really quick with no underlying identified diagnoses,” said Dr. Gregory Plemmons, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. He spoke of children who needed lots of oxygen, who developed fluid collections in their chests and who stayed in the hospital for days and days.
There had been some tragic and terrifying deaths; I read the news articles about a kindergartner — healthy boy, no asthma, no heart disease — who died at Vanderbilt in early September, and the subsequent meetings held at his school with crowds of worried parents, about the sanitizing of the school and the wiping down of the district’s 600 school buses.
There was no H1N1 vaccine available in early September, but Dr. Plemmons said his clinic had recently received a limited supply. “I think there’s some parents that are clamoring for it, some that are fearful that the vaccine is just as dangerous as the actual disease,” he said.
Dr. Paul A. Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has written extensively about vaccines and the antivaccine movement. The H1N1 vaccine has 60 years of experience and technology behind it, he said; it’s safe, it’s clearly effective — and yet many people still have difficulty “figuring out where the real risks lie.”
Dr. Offit wondered if people were more comfortable with sins of omission than of commission. Rather than inject a foreign substance into your body, he went on, “you’ll take your chances with a natural virus infection, which may or may not kill you.”
We are not seeing an epidemic of devastating disease, at least not now. But we are seeing a lot of infections with a virus against which children have no immunity, and which has already caused more deaths in children under 5 than we would see in years of regular seasonal flu.
The divided public mood about H1N1 — fear of vaccine and fear that there won’t be enough of it — reminds Dr. Offit of a joke Woody Allen tells in “Annie Hall.” One woman complains that the food at a Catskills resort is terrible, and her friend agrees: “And such small portions!”
So yes, I’m scared. I worry about H1N1 when a young child with cough and fever shows up; I worry about not being able to pick out that healthy child who may go on to get very sick, very fast. That is your basic pediatric nightmare: How do we judge which children are likely to get better and which few may get much sicker, and even die? That is why I find myself trying to offer parents exactly what I want for my own children: vaccine, protection, immunity.
In the clinic, we advise parents to have their children immunized, especially those with asthma or other chronic problems. “People all over the city are begging for this vaccine,” I heard another doctor tell a mother. “We’re incredibly lucky that we have it.”
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Grady
Racer
Registered: 07/20/07
Posts: 808
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Reply with quote | #153 |
Flu shots available today in Murfreesboro here.
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Grady
Racer
Registered: 07/20/07
Posts: 808
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Reply with quote | #154 |
The Metro Nashville Health Department got another shipment of 1,300 doses of the H1N1 vaccine shot and will start giving them out today.
Quote: The H1N1 flu shot and the FluMist will be given until 4:30 p.m. today at the Lentz Public Health Center, 311 23rd Ave. N. They will be available until supplies are gone. The vaccine is free. The Health Department is limiting the H1N1 flu shot vaccine to the following at risk groups: - Pregnant women
- Caregivers and household contacts of infants under six months,
- Children six months to four years of age, and
- Children 5 – 18 years of age who have medical conditions, such as asthma, that put them at higher risk of influenza-related complications. FluMist is only offered to healthy people ages 2 through 49 years of age.
I don't meet any of these criteria, so I'll just keep waiting.
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Balance in life is over-rated. Just fit everything around running. |
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blade
Runner
Registered: 04/02/08
Posts: 250
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Reply with quote | #155 |
Gradydid you get the seasonal(non H1N1) flu vaccination?
Or am I lost in the number of posts here?
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Ken |
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Sarahp
Jogger
Registered: 01/18/09
Posts: 99
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Reply with quote | #156 |
Grady,
Some of the health departments are giving the vaccine to anyone who wants it. Wilson County is having a clinic from 1-8 on Monday the 16th. You can call 444-5325 to get a slot. Cheatham and Robertson Counties probably have clinics set up as well.
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Sarah |
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Ricky
Racer
Registered: 12/11/07
Posts: 654
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Reply with quote | #157 |
Quote: Originally Posted by Trent
Then there were the polio vaccine trials of 1954, in which parents volunteered more than a million children to receive either an experimental vaccine or a placebo. And while they trusted the medical profession much more than parents do now, there was another factor, Dr. Oshinsky said: “They also had lived through virulent epidemics. That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. You’re dealing with parents who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic.”
Why give a placebo? (just funnin' to see if you are hypochondriac or not? Then you die cause it was not for real!) huh
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