My children are no longer young. In fact they are old enough to have children of their own and when my daughter asked me if I thought her then 6 month old should get a flu shot I didn't hesitate: Absolutely, I said. And he did. Two of them, the required number. That was just before the flu season, which he has so far weathered just fine. Sadly that's not true for all children. The two most vulnerable groups for dying from influenza are children under 5 and the elderly (me). I got flu shots, too, although the evidence it will help me is not as good as the evidence my little grandson will be helped. Of the two of us, I prefer he be the one better protected, but that's just a grandpa talking. A grandpa who understands things like this happen:
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) today confirmed the state's fourth pediatric death associated with influenza. A 12 year-old girl from Worcester County died on March 16 from complications of influenza. Health officials also confirmed that a 15-year old boy from Newton died March 14 from influenza-related pneumonia. Families in Newton were notified about the death late Friday afternoon via an email message from school officials in that city. (via Big Medicine)
There's plenty of flu virus around. It's not a rare infectious disease and it can kill a child. CDC is reporting 48 pediatric deaths from flu this season [in the United States]. That's 48 mostly healthy children and it isn't the end. We still have many weeks of flu activity ahead ofus. So it happens. Here's the pediatric death experience in this season and the previous two:
The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has extended its recommendation for flu immunization in children to include all children from 6 months to 18 years. Flu shots work in children. A recent study of the 6 month to 2 year age group showed a 75% efficacy in preventing influenza hospitalizations among fully vaccinated children during the 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons (CDC Press release). But only if the child got both shots.
So I told my daughter to get the little fellow vaccinated. We can't make his life or his world risk free. But we can do things to decrease his risk and at the same time the decrease the risk for others who play with him.
They have grandpas, too.
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48 isn't much
It's also worth pointing out that since children are the most vigorous spreaders of flu (lots of close contact with peers), vaccinating them will help protect all other people as well. I vaguely remember a paper showing that with insufficient vaccine available, the best course was to vaccinate children and adults working in public. That would result in fewer deaths - including among senior citizens - than using it on the most at-risk groups directly.
Avoidable deaths... every single avoidable death is unacceptable: 48 is too much.
>48 isn't much< anon
You are one truly ignorant, despicable motherfucker.
When you take into account the huge population size of America, 48 deaths per flu season is a remarkably good result. In third world countries like India, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and the continent of Africa etc.,thousands of children die every flu season. So what is your problem?
Put it into perspective....If they had their flu shots and only 48 died then its remarkably low when you consider how many peeds there are out there. My friend Fardah in Indon says that the flu season for kids down there has been a complete ballocks up. Most didnt get flu shots, thousands were sickened and he thought this was the reason for Supari's outburst about the US.
He also said that he thought they had B.Flu. He is educated but didnt understand the diff between a RT-PCR and a blood test for B.Flu. I sent him the info and he said that he thought there were hundreds of them in the outlying areas around Jakarta if that was the case.
Flu season? Not a sniffle out of anyone this year w/wo the flu shot. The kids and mom took it. I only had the Pneumovax on board. Same results as they had.
Randy, have been trying to contact you via your email address. Have some information, re BF in India, from a very reliable source.
48?
Don't you all realize that 48 is just the reported CONFIRMED fatality count?????
FLU is VERY hard to confirm. You've heard of goldilocks? Testing has to be done just right. If you miss it, you've got just another pneumonia case that might NOT be reported in the influenza statistics.
48 is just the tip of the icberg..,
Still, 48 is a better picture than last year. BUT the density of the temporal occurence is greater than last year. Last year's cases were more sporadically distributed accros the flu season.
Look at the rest of the charts at the CDC site on Influenza deaths to get a better picture of the epidemic we are facing.
Overall, this is a worse year than last and the year before that.
Influenza vaccines missed the major players in this years season.
I'm sure that in the morning, the Reveres will have a bit more to say on the topic.
In general, with the conflict of interest and corruption of our regulatory and health agencies in government, I would be concerned about giving vaccines for influenza. How many vaccines are being given to children this age anyways
Ans:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/recs/schedules/downloads/child/2008/08_0-6y… ,
and what studies have been done to show their safety. A quick search was not at all encouraging.
http://www.medicalconsumers.org/pages/SafetyofFlueVaccineinKids.html
"Last winter, researchers found that influenza vaccines provide no benefit to babies under age two years. In children over the age of two, vaccines showed a modest reduction in cases of influenza. But there is no evidence that vaccines can prevent the serious complications that are the primary justification for vaccinating children. That was the conclusion of a review of all relevant studies published last February in the British journal, Lancet.
The authors of this review, Tom Jefferson, MD, and colleagues at the Cochrane Collaboration, recently wrote a follow-up in a letter to the editor of The Lancet. They reported that the safety of influenza vaccines given to babies and children is unknown. Incredibly, most of the trials they reviewed were not designed to assess serious adverse reactions.
Given the fact that the U.S. and Canada now recommend flu vaccines for all children older than six months, this news is extremely disturbing. The review published last winter focused solely on the question of how well flu vaccines work for children over six months. After the review was published, Dr. Jefferson and colleagues took on the equally important question of vaccine safety.
At issue are two types of vaccines: inactivated and live attenuated (nasal spray). Where it concerned the inactivated vaccine, the research on safety was pitiful. Only one trial exists; it was small (35 participants) and conducted 30 years ago. All other safety studies of inactivated vaccine were in children three years or older. When the reviewers looked at safety studies of the live attenuated vaccine, Dr. Jefferson explained in an e-mail interview, ?We found clear evidence of systematic suppression (non-reporting) of safety data.? Worse, he said that the authors of the trials did not have access to safety data from their own trials! ?Do U.S. parents know all this?? asked Dr. Jefferson, ?I do not think so.?
One trial in this review stood out from the rest. With 10,000 participants, it included a chart showing a nearly double number of ?medical adverse events? among the vaccinated kids, compared with the unvaccinated. When Dr. Jefferson and colleagues noticed that fewer than half of these events had been adequately identified, they wrote to request the missing data, first from the lead author and then from the final authority, the vaccine manufacturer MedImmune. The company?s response: ?MedImmune does not provide safety data to outside parties.? "
http://www.vran.org/vaccines/flu/flu-effectiveness.htm
I assume from source and the low numbers that these figures are paediatric deaths *in the USA*, but you don't actually say so. Maybe an edit is in order. I imagine the world numbers would be a lot scarier. (NB in the UK, influenza vaccinations are not recommended for healthy children, of any age. Mine gets one, but only because I seek one out for him and pay.)
Math: Thanks. Added as an edit in brackets.