Every year, as we enter flu season, we wonder about those flu shot ads from Health Canada. Should we risk neurological disorders—or bruised arms—to avoid a fever?
Influenza strikes as many as eight million people in Canada during flu season (between October and April); immunization is one of the few preventative measures we have. Getting a flu shot is like an annual ritual—and it should be, says Health Canada. They say that the shot significantly reduces your chances of catching the virus, but recently doubts have surfaced concerning the efficacy and safety of the vaccine.
Last Wednesday, the CBC ran a story about a B.C. man who contracted a debilitating condition linked to the flu shot. It left him paralyzed for almost five months. There is also mounting evidence that call the vaccine’s effectiveness into question. Dr. Sumit Majumdar, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, the Department of Medicine, released a study in 2007 that refutes the benefits of the flu shot. According to Majumdar, the vaccine isn’t effective in protecting seniors from complications like pneumonia.
Majumdar and his colleagues analyzed clinical records in six Alberta hospitals. They studied 700 matched patients, most of whom were aged 65 and older, who had been hospitalized for community-acquired pneumonia during non-flu season. Half of the patients had received the flu shot, and half had not. Each vaccinated patient was matched to a non-vaccinated patient of similar age, same sex, and other demographic characteristics, with shared medical conditions.
They found only a marginal decrease in the relative risk of death. “The real issue here is those previous studies that for nearly 20 years have suggested the flu shot could reduce mortality rates in the elderly by up to 50 per cent, aren’t plausible,” Dr. Majumdar concluded. To understand why this is the case, one must first understand how researchers concoct the vaccine.
Every year, flu experts make an educated guess about which flu strains will end up being the most common before deciding which ones to include in the vaccine the following year. But they don’t always get it right. Last year, researchers didn’t choose the correct strains. “As a result, we had quite a robust year for influenza,” Dr. Don Low, Microbiologist-in-Chief at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, told the CBC. Dr. Bruce Gellin, Director of the Health and Human Service Department’s National Vaccine Program Office, told reporters, “It’s hard to make sense of it…[We] really need to have a system in place year to year that tracks the efficacy of the vaccine.” So far, no such steps have been taken.
Maybe we should reevaluate our immunization campaigns. Not only does our flu shot seem useless (40 per cent efficacy rate according to one study), it’s also costing our government a bundle. About 10 million doses of influenza vaccine are distributed in Canada each year, adding up to almost $800 million dollars spent immunizing Canadians against influenza. By comparison, the estimated worldwide annual expenditure on research on malaria, a potentially fatal disease which affects over 40 per cent of the world’s population, was $58 million. Canada should divert some of this obscene expenditure to solving real dangers, faced by defenseless people. There are other means of curing the flu once it’s been caught.
So let the flu season come. It’s not the first or last time we’re going through it unimmunized. Even if the flu shot does have a positive effect, I prefer the “apple a day” approach to that of a 16-gauge needle.
