A Path With Paws

I just read a very interesting article in the Atlantic, Does Vacccine Matter? While I admit this article is three pages long, it is also one of the most comprehensive articles written on why flu vaccines may not really be helping us. If you have the time I highly recommend reading this. As many of you know one of my primary veterinary interests is in infectious disease prevention and proper vaccination and that carries over to the human world at times

Why is this an important topic?

For a few reasons.

Vaccinations have side effects and if a vaccine is not helping you it is probably hurting you. If we are doing more harm then good in vaccinating for the flu it would be good to know it.

Our government is banking on the fact that vaccination and antivirals will stop a deadly flu epidemic should be ever see one again like the flu epidemic of 1918. No true double blinded studies have been run on if the flu vaccine is helping us. Wouldn’t it be good to run these on a lesser strain of flu now so that we know if our vaccines are effective and can modify them if they are not?

In using anti-virals on non-deadly strains of flu we are creating resistance should we need them for more deadly strains. Anti-virals are also strong medicines with potential side effects including death. Once again we do not know how effective these drugs really are.

Tags: flu

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 4:46 pm and is filed under health, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.