Survey: Majority Of Doctors Will Get Flu Shot This Year
Disease experts have found encouragement from a survey released Thursday that found that almost all US doctors said they plan to get vaccinated against the flu this season.
Dr William Schaffner, of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, was hopeful that other health care professionals would follow the same direction. “To all nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, pharmacists and others — please, get vaccinated and recommend the vaccine to your patients.”
Previous surveys have shown that fewer than 40 percent of healthcare professionals ever get vaccinated against the flu — even during last year’s H1N1 pandemic. Having a healthcare workforce so uncertain about being vaccinated was an embarrassment to officials.
The survey of 400 doctors showed that 95 percent of them said they planned to get the flu vaccine this season, and 96 percent said they recommend the vaccine to friends and family. The online survey had a 5.8 percent margin of error.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) flu expert Dr Dan Jernigan told Reuters Health that nearly 119 million flu vaccine doses are in doctor’s offices, pharmacies and clinics and people should start receiving them now.
This year’s vaccine protects against swine flu, H3N2 and influenza B.
Officials at the CDC said that the five companies — Sanofi Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, MedImmune, and CSL — that produce the flu vaccine for the US market expect to provide up to 160 million doses later this season.
The US government recommends that all Americans get vaccinated.
“The manufacturers have always made a supply larger than the demand and they’ve always had to throw vaccine away,” Stephen Foster, of the American Pharmacists Association, told Reuters.
The CDC estimates that nearly all 115 million doses of flu vaccine were used last year, but of the 162 million H1N1 swine flu doses distributed, only about half were used.
Vaccine makers struggled to make a vaccination against swine flu after it emerged in early 2009. By the time it was available on a wide scale, the pandemic’s first wave had passed.
The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases released a second survey showing that 57 percent of Americans plan to get flu vaccines this season, based on a poll of 1,000 people. Of those not planning on getting vaccinated, 71 percent said there are other effective ways to prevent the flu, 69 percent said they are too healthy for the flu to worry them and 62 percent believe the vaccine can cause the flu.
The CDC noted that depending on which flu strains are most active, seasonal flu annually kills anywhere from 3,300 to 49,000 Americans, many of them previously completely healthy.
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