H1N1-Not food related

I needed a place to post this. A message from a local hospital to the staff. Trying to combat some of the misinformation out there.
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As you know, all employees, medical staff and volunteers are strongly encouraged to get vaccinated for novel H1N1 flu as soon as possible as vaccines become available. (Please see our Flu Vaccinations page for information about when and where you can get vaccinated.)

Young people are being hit especially hard by novel H1N1. According to the CDC, 78% of those hospitalized for novel H1N1 from Aug. 30 to Oct. 10 this year were under age 50.

If you are in this age group or have family members who are, please read the message below.

One doctor’s story
The email below was written on Oct. 13 by an ED doctor at a Midwestern hospital, who sent it to one of our board members. It was written to one of the doctor’s relatives, who had received an email rumor that said taking Vitamin D is as effective against H1N1 as the vaccine, and that also questioned the safety of the vaccine.

(Both the doctor and the parents of the child have given us permission to share this story. However, to protect their privacy, names and identifying details have been removed.)

I got forwarded your email about what I thought of the [H1N1] flu vaccine. First, some data so that we're on the same page:

H1N1 (swine flu) is has a transmission rate of about 30%. What that means is that this virus is incredibly infectious. If you contact someone with swine flu, you have a nearly one in three chance of picking it up from that one contact. Multiple contacts obviously increase that chance. A whole winter in malls and restaurants and offices. . . Bottom line, you and your family WILL get H1N1 if you do not get vaccinated—unless you move to a cabin far in the woods and have no contact with anyone until next summer. You WILL get this. Period.

The average person who gets H1N1 gets a high fever, headache, cough and feels horrible for about a week. Then they are fine. H1N1 has a mortality rate of about 0.2%. That's one in 500. Not too bad odds for betting. Fairly low for any one person, but approach it this way:

If there are 500 kids in [your daughter]'s school, one of them is going to die from swine flu this winter. Odds are, she will know this person.

Now the really nasty part.

H1N1, as of last week, has caused 79 deaths in children since April of this year. Nineteen of these deaths were last week. Average for an influenza season is 70 to 80 deaths. So, we are already passing what is normal for a year, and we haven't even started the winter.

More so, the rate of kids dying seems to be speeding up: 60 from April to September and then 19 in the first week of October. The number now is at least 80. How do I know this? Have a look at the attached photo. [Photo shows a young boy and girl in a pool.]

The girl in the middle of the pool is your niece. The little boy on the right is dead. Influenza caused an encephalitis and ravaged his brain, and he was pronounced dead at 7:20 a.m. today. His father is one of my partners. Yesterday I stood over his lifeless little body in the Pediatric ICU at Minneapolis Children's Hospital while his mother cried in my arms. Today I will help his father figure out where to bury him.

People these days are afraid of vaccines. Why? Because they haven't seen the awful things that vaccines prevent. Parents these days have not seen polio, mumps, measles, smallpox, etc. They hear stories of autism and listen to [actress] Jenny McCarthy, and they fear the boogie man they can see; they have completely forgotten about the one that our grandparents eradicated for us.

Never mind that there is absolutely NO accurate information—people are choosing to listen to Jenny McCarthy and not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People are choosing to listen to the same source of information that produced the stories about spiders underneath your toilet biting your behind and killing you. People fear documented vaccine complications like Guillain Barre disease, never mind that the risk of this has been documented to be one in 1 million.

The risk of dying from swine flu is one in 500—higher for our children—but we instead try to avoid a one in a million complication risk from the vaccination? Your lifetime risk of death in a car accident is one in 84, yet how many times did you buckle your baby into the car seat to run some pointless and unnecessary errand? Please take the time to open this article and look at the risk chart. Look at what is number five.

The [email containing the internet rumor about Vitamin D] you were forwarded makes claims about the production of the new vaccine that are patently untrue. Please read the CDC’s website on this issue, especially "Will this vaccine be made differently than the seasonal influenza vaccine?” The answer is: “No. This vaccine will be made using the same processes and facilities that are used to make the currently licensed seasonal influenza vaccines."

There are no easy answers. There is no Vitamin D cure. There is no global conspiracy amongst doctors and big pharma.

My prediction is this: Thousands of children will die unnecessarily this winter because their parents took the word of Fox News and scare tactic emails and their accountant friends who proclaim to know "the truth" about vaccinations.

I apologize for the tone of this email, but it reflects the fact that I am sitting here alone in a cold house because I have sent my family away. I am unwilling to risk bringing home a disease from work that killed my friend's baby this morning.

When you make your decisions on this, do the research. Do not take the advice of any one source, including me. But please, for the love of God, do not make decisions about the well-being of yourself and your children based on the unsubstantiated, uninformed recommendations of an unsolicited email or a newscaster.

Stay up to date
staff, physicians and volunteers in the NWSA can stay up to date on flu through our internal Flu Resources website. Be sure to check our Flu Vaccinations page for information about getting vaccinated.


Thank you for all you are doing to protect our patients and community and to stay healthy during flu season.

Best wishes,