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Thursday, April 03, 2003Men and women over the age of 65 stand to gain a host of health benefits from getting a flu shot, including a decreased risk of dying of any cause during flu season, scientists reported Wednesday. ...To see if a flu shot might cut the risk, Nichol's team looked at more than 140,000 men and women 65 years and older during the 1998-1999 flu season and again during the 1999-2000 flu season. In 1999, 56 percent of the group had a flu shot; that proportion rose to nearly 60 percent in 2000. Vaccination against flu reduced the risk of being hospitalized for heart disease by 19 percent, according to the report in Thursday's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. Additionally, those who got the flu shot reduced the chances of being hospitalized for cerebrovascular disease by 16 to 23 percent and the risk of being hospitalized for pneumonia or influenza by 29 to 32 percent. Overall, a flu shot cut the risk of dying of any cause by 48 to 50 percent, according to the report. That does, indeed sound like a wonder cure. The authors even use the phrase “protects against heart disease” in the original paper. But, the percentage of people - vaccinated and unvaccinated - who ended up dying or hospitalized for anything during the study was surprisingly small - 1.1% of vaccinated subjects were hospitalized for heart disease during the first study period compared to 1.6% of unvaccinated subjects. During the second period studied the figures were 1.2% vs. 1.4%. For death, the numbers were 1.2% for the vaccinated compared to 2.2% of the unvaccinated during the first study period, and 1.2% vs. 1.7% for the second study period. Hardly earth-shattering differences. Not that I don’t recommend the flu immunization. I do. The elderly are particularly vulnerable to influenza, and it helps cut down on complications from the disease. It definitely saves lives. It just doesn’t prevent heart disease and death from all causes. This sort of hyperbole only undermines the legitimate claims for vaccines. When you have researchers hyping the immunization as a preventive to heart disease in the media, it has the potential to cause substantial blow back when those expectations aren’t met. “What do you mean I had a heart attack? I had my flu shot this year!” Or, “Oh, no, my husband had one of those flu shots last year and he died anyways. I won’t have it.” We should be truthful about what our therapies can do. Taking the Madison Avenue approach to sell an immunization to the public is just wrong. posted by Sydney on 4/03/2003 08:04:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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