No excuses not to get the flu vaccine this year

The advice: Expand the vaccination period and, while you're at it, don't forget to offer a pneumococcal shot for elderly patients.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. Oct. 8, 2007.

Washington -- Influenza vaccine should be plentiful for the upcoming season -- at an expected 132 million doses, it would be the most ever -- but the challenge to use it all remains.

Not that there aren't plenty of people who need the vaccine and haven't been getting it.

New data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal alarmingly low immunization rates for children and adults. Equally concerning are data showing that, for the past decade, just 40% of physicians and other health care workers have been vaccinated.

CDC Director Julie Gerberding, MD, MPH, called this statistic "the saddest piece of information we have." She said the vaccine protects not only the recipients but also their families and their patients. "In this era where everyone is concerned about patient safety and quality of care, it is unconscionable that a health care worker would not get this vaccine." She and others spoke at a Sept. 19 briefing marking the start of this year's flu season.

Jeanne Santoli, MD, MPH, deputy director of the CDC's Immunization Services Division, said health care providers' low coverage rate reveals an important coverage gap. "This data is important because it not only impacts how well it protects health care workers but how well we protect the high-risk patients that these providers see and care for every day."

Reasons put forward in past years for this low immunization rate include lack of awareness by health care workers that they are among the groups needing to be vaccinated, lack of access to vaccine, cost and the misperception that influenza is not a serious disease. But, as AMA Trustee Ardis Hoven, MD, pointed out, research shows that health care facilities can greatly improve employees' vaccination rates by highlighting the value and safety of the vaccine and making it free and convenient.