All Posts Tagged With: "H1N1 Vaccine"
Ontario to students: get H1N1 flu shot
College and university students are at a greater risk of infection
Ontario has launched a $650,000 “Join the Resistance” ad campaign to encourage college and university students to roll up their sleeves for the H1N1 flu shot. It has also given the go-ahead for companies to vaccinate employees in the workplace. Some workplace clinics could begin as early as next week at some locations in the province, officials said.
Ontario’s chief medical officer of health said Friday that almost half of those hospitalized in Ontario for swine flu are people under 20. Thirteen per cent of deaths in Ontario related to H1N1 have been in people under age 25.
However, historically only about 25 per cent of people aged 17 to 24 get a seasonal flu shot compared to about 45 to 50 per cent of the general population, Dr. Arlene King told a briefing. Yet college and university students are at a greater risk of transmitting the infection because they live and study in close proximity to each other in dormitory rooms and study halls, she said.
King cited statistics that 25,000 or more of every 100,000 people who are not immunized will get sick with the flu. Of those, 25 to 100 will need hospitalization, 20 to 50 will end up in intensive care with most of them needing ventilators, and six will die.
“People cannot afford to let their guard down,” said King. “Everyone, including healthy young people, need to protect themselves against this new flu virus and the best way to do that is to get their flu shot,” she said.
The Ontario government sent an “email blast” this week to 53 student associations targeting 400,000 students. It also sent posters aimed at students to public health units and is posting advertising on websites to drive students to clinic listings. Next month, ads will be put in bars and restaurants. An animated “Join the Resistance” ad will run in cinemas throughout Ontario during the holidays.
The campaign to convince students to get immunized comes as several health units have decided to close their mass vaccination clinics next month after seeing a drop in H1N1 activity and public demand for the swine flu shot. Fifty-three flu assessment centres have also closed, leaving just six open.
Health units will “clearly be looking over the next couple of weeks” to decide if they still need mass vaccination clinics, King said. But the vaccine is available at more than 4,500 doctors’ offices, family health teams, hospitals and community health clinics across the province, said King. Students have also been receiving the shots at some universities including the University of Ottawa and Brock University.
Why students should get the H1N1 vaccine
Set aside your invincibility complex and protect those around you
Yesterday, I started thinking about the H1N1 vaccine. The “swine flu” is something I’d only been sort of considering and only in the abstract. It would cross my consciousness now and then when I read a news report or saw a mass-mail email from Dalhousie in my Inbox. The news would filter in one ear and out the other. It felt far away, inconsequential. All of that ended this week when I found out that the swine flu has landed at my school.
Since we’re small, we often end up feeling separated from the outside world. As I learned today in a class from another student, H1N1 showed up at Dal residence in September. “It’s not a new thing,” she told me, in that patient tone I get a lot from Dal students.
I guess it’s not. We have been hearing about this full-blown pandemic since June when the WHO declared it. We’ve become experts at sneezing into arms and pumping the Purell as we traipse down the hall. And this month, we’ve started hearing about the hows and wheres and whens of the promised vaccine.
I never get the flu shot. Instead of getting the flu shot, I make fun of my friends who do get the yearly vaccine by telling them “Congratulations! You won’t get the flu last year”. Especially for young, healthy people like me, I have real questions about the efficacy of the usual flu vaccines. I think that this led to my blase attitude over the new H1N1 vaccine.
I’m not the only one lacking much motivation. Macleans.ca tells me that as the first wave has died down, so too has vaccine excitement:
A recent poll shows that, as of the first week of October, only one in three Canadians plan on getting the H1N1 vaccine, according to Harris/Decima. That’s down from 45 per cent in late August.
The picture the WHO painted for us seems sketchy now. A lot of people have been getting H1N1… and then recovering. People we even know. And now as cold and flu season sets in, we get… the normal cold. Where is this pandemic of appocalyptic proportions I was worried about? I don’t see it. So I stopped worrying.
When my degree of separation to H1N1 went from triple digits to single overnight, I woke up. There is more at stake then my health, or worse, my midterms. If I woke up tomorrow and realized that this head cold is actually H1N1, even if I immediately went into quarantine, I would have exposed a lot of people to my illness already: all of the people in all of my classes; all of the people I rode on the bus with; the little girl I met on the quad; the little old ladies at the church. My illness affects more people than just me.
