Require flu shots for US health workers, group says
25 Jan 2007 21:16:25 GMT Source: Reuters
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - U.S. doctors, nurses and other health care workers should be required to get the influenza vaccine annually to help prevent spread of the illness to their patients, the top U.S. professional group of infectious diseases experts said on Thursday. Only about 40 percent of them currently get vaccinated, creating a dangerous vulnerability in U.S. flu preparations, the Infectious Diseases Society of America said. They said health care workers can infect their patients with seasonal flu, which kills 36,000 Americans a year. The group called for mandatory vaccinations of doctors, nurses and others working in health care facilities, allowing them to decline in writing for specific reasons. "It should be an informed, very conscious opting out for religious or medical reasons rather than simply because it's inconvenient to go in and get your flu vaccine," Dr. Andrew Pavia of the University of Utah Medical Center, head of the group's public health committee, told reporters. It was part of recommendations the group made to U.S. leaders to make the nation better prepared for what it called an "inevitable influenza pandemic," perhaps involving bird flu, as well as the ongoing threat of normal seasonal influenza. "There's no better example of what we should do to prepare for a pandemic than to become extremely good at vaccinating health care workers and protecting patients when they come into health care facilities," Pavia added. Individual hospitals should enforce the requirement, and the percentage of workers who are vaccinated should be used as a quality measure for these facilities, Pavia said. Pavia said he was concerned the threat of a flu pandemic remains very real and the impact of seasonal flu outbreaks remains an important public health concern, but the failure of a pandemic to materialize has led many to "flu fatigue." Such requirements for health care workers are not unprecedented, Pavia said, noting requirements for hepatitis B vaccines and, for those in children's hospitals, measles and chickenpox vaccines. Vaccinating health care workers is needed to protect hospital patients, who tend to be more susceptible to flu, Pavia said. "There are a lot of health care workers and people in general who have misconceptions (about the vaccine). They think the vaccine doesn't work. They think it can give them the flu. All of those are false," Pavia said. International health authorities are monitoring the spread of the H5N1 avian flu virus amid concern it could cause a pandemic threatening millions of people. Many experts consider the United States poorly prepared for such an event.
