Vaccinate all healthcare workers, says flu expert

Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist

It is time to toughen up on flu vaccination and make health workers have a jab to stop infection spreading.
Only 40 per cent of healthcare workers get a flu jab, despite free and ready access to the vaccine. But 40,000 Americans die of influenza each year and some of them contract the virus in hospital from infected care workers.

That is why flu expert Dr Trish Perl of Johns Hopkins University says that it's perhaps time to go for mandatory vaccination of health workers - or at least active declination of the jab. Voluntary guidelines don't seem to work. When staff are vaccinated, shots are 88 per cent effective at preventing infection, according to other Hopkins studies.

On questioning, health care workers said lack of time was the main reason preventing them having a flu jab. And, surprisingly, 30 per cent believed that having that jab would make them more likely to catch flu, which is not the case. Whether or not the feared pandemic of bird flu actually occurs, we still need to worry about ordinary flu. Mass vaccination would go a long way to cutting the death toll from flu.

Source
Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology online 9th November 2005