Canadians Blasé Over ‘Flu
Canadians are too blasé about getting or not getting their annual Canada drug ‘flu vaccines, according to doctors worried by the results of the Canadian Community Health Survey. The survey shows that no less than three out of four people who took the survey and did not receive the Canadian drug ‘flu vaccine in 2009 said they didn’t believe it was necessary, while another thirteen percent of those who didn’t receive it said they had just not got around to it.
The statistics are a worry for doctors, who fear that that the fact that the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 was less severe than expected could be creating a false sense of security in the community, and a misguided belief that the Canada drug flu vaccine is not all that important. “That’s the challenge we have – how to engage with the public and explain risk,” states the director of the Canadian Center for Vaccinology at Halifax’s IWK Health Centre, Scott Halperin. Halperin says that many people operate under the assumption that because the ‘flu “missed me this time, therefore I was right not to get” the Canadian drug flu vaccine. “The question is, what would that second peak (of the 2009 pandemic) have looked like had we not had the population immunized?” he asks. “Would it have been a larger, broader, more prolonged peak? Would there have been a third wave? None of these things we really can tell.”
Andrew Simor, a disease expert from Toronto’s Sunnybrook Institute, is likewise concerned by the findings, noting that even “In an average year, five thousand or six thousand Canadians die related to influenza. That’s a pretty substantial burden of disease”.
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