Does getting a flu vaccination really improve your chances on NOT getting the flu? I have heard from university professors that it most definitely does not improve your chances of not getting the flu, yet I have heard in news articles that it greatly improves your chances of not getting the flu. What should I believe?
Vaccinations stimulate the body’s resistance to the disease vaccinated against.
They do work.
A tiny percentage of people vaccinated do contract a weakened version of the disease. Less than 1 in 100,000.
The odds of dying from influenza are much, much greater than that. All the Americans killed by terrorists in history do not equal the number of Americans who die every year from influenza.
So get the dammed shot.
And remember–there are a lot of oddballs at the University.
Professors are learned–in their specialized field.
But outside of it? PHOOEY!
Learned is not the same as Wise, nor Sane.
The “university professors” are misinformed.
Flu vaccine is cited here as being 70-90% effective in preventing influenza. More information available here.
A challenge with the flu vaccine is trying to predict ahead of time which strains of virus are likely to be circulating during flu season, and preparing a vaccine to deal with those strains. If something unexpected turns up, the vaccine will be less protective. Some groups most at risk (like the elderly) don’t develop as good an antibody response from the vaccine as young healthy adults, but still have a lesser chance of developing serious flu complications (for instance, pneumonia) if they are vaccinated.
It’s important to get information about vaccines from reliable sources. I’ve noticed that publicity about flu vaccines this fall has been accompanied by a flood of bad information from groups that oppose all vaccines for philosophical or religious reasons.
Jackmannii, M.D.
Bzzt, nope, they don’t. From Jackmannii’s link:
Now, you might consider that a “weakened version” of the disease, but it’s not. The fever and aches are not the result of any actual viral strains infecting you. And you can still get an actual influenza infection even with a vaccine, since the vaccine takes a couple weeks to work, and doesn’t protect against all strains.
You are correct.
I had been reading a history of smallpox recently, & that vaccine can do this.
Mixed memories.
In general, they do work. As mentioned above, the tough part is making the shot so that it works against the dominant flu strains. Anecdotally, I get the shot every year, and did so last year. This fall my entire family (spouse, 2 kids) came down with the flu, and lay around the house like zombies. I wandered among them, immune, feeling like the Omega Man.
The real benefit to vaccines is that by getting the shot you protect the people you meet from getting the flu from you. If you’re healthy and robust, you’ll likely survive it the flu. The person you give it to may not.
These professors could be right, in a nitpicky way – but they are wrong in their basic premise that getting the flu shot will not help you stay healthy.
Technically, the flu shot does not improve your chances of avoiding influenza infection, rather it helps your body fight it once it has been infected. If it works well, your body will be able to fight it off so that you never have the main symptoms (fever, nausea, headache, muscle aches, coughing, congestion, etc.), and you may not even notice that your body was infected.
So while they were technically right, in that the flu shot does nothing to prevent influenza infection, they are wrong in the accepted sense. When people say “getting the flu”, they mean coming down with the uncomfortable symptoms of influenza – if your body fights off the infection so that never happens, people say they ‘avoided the flu’.
The Evidence-Based Medicine site Bandolier skeptically and rigorously evaluates the evidence for medical interventions and sums up their conclusions in pithy, easy to understand statements. They last looked at flu vaccine in 2000 and their assessment is worth a look at http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band73/b73-7.html Of relevance to this thread is their observation that “The mean reduction in influenza cases was by 29% (95% confidence interval 12 to 42%). It was somewhat higher when vaccines matched the circulating strain. The number needed to treat was 9.2 (7.8 to 11.1). This means that for every nine people given influenza vaccine, one avoided having influenza who would have had it if they had not been vaccinated.”
Predicting the strain of flu that is likely to infect North America is done months ahead of time and is not always accurate. It is not a guarantee of not getting the flu as there are many many different strains floating around. Most people think of the flu as associated with vomiting. This is a fallacy as influenza is primarily a respiratory infection. Tonight, my son vomited several times. The most likely cause of this is food poisoning.
Also consider that the flu is usually a problem only for the very young and very old (Except for the Spanish flu of 1918).
It is a personal decision. One doctor told me that it may be more dangerous to have a needle pierce your skin than to get the flu itself.
IANAD and this is just an opinion based on what I have read and experienced.
So what are your odds of getting the flu (each year) if you’re not vaccinated but not in a high risk group? If they’re fairly low anyway, isn’t it hard to prove they vastly lower your risk?
And how are the numbers of flu victims recorded, anyway? A lot of people claim bad head or chest colds, or even a stomach/intestinal bugs make them victims of “the flu,” so is it more rigid than fairly uninformed self-reporting?
Yes. You have to do larger vaccine trial (i.e., study a larger number of subjects).
Yes, it is. To estimate the burden of influenza in the United States, the CDC uses five categories of information, some of which is quite specific (i.e., requiring culture of an influenza virus) and some of which is not specific but is more sensitive (counting of influenza-like illnesses). The systems are:
- Viral Surveillance — About 80 U.S. World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Laboratories and 70 National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System (NREVSS) laboratories located throughout the United States report the total number of respiratory specimens tested and the number positive for influenza types A and B each week.
- Outpatient Illness Surveillance — Information on patient visits to health care providers for influenza-like illness or acute respiratory infections are collected through two systems: U.S. Influenza Sentinel Providers Surveillance Network and the BioSense Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) Outpatient Surveillance
- Mortality Surveillance — Rapid tracking of influenza-associated deaths is done through two systems: 122 Cities Mortality Reporting System and Surveillance for Influenza-associated Pediatric Mortality
- Hospitalization Surveillance — Two systems monitor hospitalizations among children with laboratory confirmed influenza infections: Emerging Infections Program (EIP)and the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN)
- Summary of the Geographic Spread of Influenza — State health departments report the estimated level of spread of influenza activity in their states each week through the State and Territorial Epidemiologists Reports.
A more complete description of these systems can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/fluactivity.htm