Why students should get the H1N1 vaccine

Another point, an important one for university students, is that I live in residence, as do many university students.  We live in close quarters where we share rooms, cafeterias, and bathrooms.  As my mother has reminded me often, I am very at risk.  And I am not invincible.  Here is what someone who knows more than I do has to say in a Globe and Mail article:

“What the public needs to understand is that people who are getting critically ill with H1N1 look just like you and me – they’re essentially healthy people,” Anand Kumar of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, said in an interview.

This is not the flu that only the very young and the elderly need to worry about.  Check the news; this is incapacitating, and even killing, teenagers.   Andre Picard put it well in the Globe and Mail:

While H1N1 flu is unpleasant, only a fraction of the infected will get so sick that they require hospitalization, and fewer still will die. But because the denominator is so large, a lot of severely ill people will be in intensive care in the coming weeks, and the deaths will be counted in the hundreds, perhaps thousands.

This flu is not the usual flu, and I will not treat it like it is.  I will be getting the vaccine; and you should too.