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For Some Medical Workers, a Flu Shot Or Possible Job Loss
theodp writes "Want to work at Winthrop Hospital? Roll up your sleeve, and we'll talk. TIME reports that every employee at the Long Island hospital — from doctors and nurses who care for patients to the administrative, housekeeping and food-service personnel — must be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu or face termination. The mandate comes from the health department of New York, the first state to require all health-care workers to be vaccinated against influenza. Meanwhile, two-thirds of parents say they'll avoid flu shots for their little ones like, well, the flu. So who should you believe — Dr. Bill Frist or 'Dr.' Bill Maher? Before you decide, perhaps a consultation with Dr. Google is in order."
The makers of vaccines, if the vaccine makes you sick? http://www.attorneyatlaw.com/2009/07/dont-even-think-about-suing-if-youre-hurt-by-swine-flu-vaccines/
The force is not with you and you are not a jedi.
With the degree of hype H1N1 is getting, people are going to be searching all over at the first signs of anything - even if they don't have ANY kind of flu!
So it's a great chart to show you the regions of greatest hypochondria, but little else at this point (in other times I'm sure it's a good indicator).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aggressive vaccinations are a good thing. Think we could have practically wiped out polio or smallpox in this country if we just kicked back and waited to see what happened? Of course the flu isn't the same, and I know it's not going anywhere. But if you think for a second that every healthcare worker shouldn't get the flu shot, you don't know a lot about healthcare. This sort of thing isn't to protect the workers, it's to protect the immunocompromised people in the hospital. They need our healthy immune systems to protect them, too.
The summary is a little sensationalistic. It says 2/3 of parents are avoiding 'flu shots, whereas the article quotes 22% as the figure, with the remainder saying they would definitely vaccinate, or that they would try to vaccinate.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
I am no medical expert but I am pretty sure we can't "cure" the flu... Doesn't the thing constantly mutate making a "polio-like" vaccine impossible?
Slashdot is too nerdy for me.
Let's see; people who have a very good chance of coming into direct contact with those infected with H1N1 flu on a daily basis and then subsequently coming into contact with others who may be in high-risk groups for said virus being required to get vaccinated against it? Madness, I say. This is what happens when you let government have control over health care. Socialism. Communists. Sky...falling etc.
Now termination may be a bit harsh, but removal from front-line duties for those who refuse the vaccination seems more than reasonable to me. H1N1 may not be the epic disaster that was predicted, but that doesn't mean we should just ignore it entirely.
Maybe my tin foil hat isn't adjusted right, but of all the vaccines out there, the flu shot (or mist as most people get it these days) is about as safest of them all. Incredibly low side effect rate, very effective, and a guarantee that you're going to get a mild version of the flu before everybody else does. Plus, if you are working in a medical care facility, you won't be an oxygen-burning flu contamination source, making it possible to keep the spread of these viruses down to a minimum.
Yes, the Swine Vaccine in the 70's was very poorly executed and there were many problems. But holy cow folks, it's been over 30 years and medicine has come just a short distance since. For the last 18 years getting a flu shot has been a federally mandated condition of my employment and I don't even work in a health care related field--what the heck is the big deal with getting a flu shot?
Starting next week, all passwords will be entered in morse code.
Maher's a funny guy, and I like a lot of what he stands for. However, his stances on things like medicine and nutrition are total whack-job, and that's putting it kindly. I saw the Maher interview with Frist the other night. All I can say is that if even one person is influenced to NOT take the H1N1 vaccine based on Bill's foolish, uninformed, hippie opinion on the matter, and subsequently that person gets infected and dies, then IMO Bill is culpable. All available data strongly supports the safety and effectiveness of vaccination. Not vaccinating based on superstition is grossly irresponsible.
If you've got a compromised immune system, then working at a hosipital is the last thing that you want to do. Getting fired would probably save your life.
This isn't new; if anything, mandatory vaccination laws have become much more lenient in the United States than they used to be. In the early 20th century, 11 states had fully mandatory vaccination laws, not just "must get vaccinated as a condition of attending public schools" or "must be vaccinated as a condition of working in certain occupations" sorts of things. Rather, it was a requirement for living in the jurisdiction that you must be vaccinated. Massachusetts's mandatory smallpox vaccination law was upheld by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1905, which is still the main precedent on the subject.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If the influenza pandemic will kill off Extreme Programming, now that's something I can get behind.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I only know Maher from youtube clips, he is a smart and funny guy but every now and then he demonstrates he hasn't quite got the hang of the critical thinking thing and comes out with "alternative" health advise that makes me groan. I once heard him repeat the 1990's greenpeace meme that putting clorine in the water to kill bugs was a BadThing(TM), never mind that it is probably the single biggest public health improvement of the 20th century in terms of lives saved.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"then IMO Bill is culpable"
Why? If someone is stupid enough to take medical advice from a comedian/political satirist then any negative outcome of that is just natural selection. It's not like he's pretending to be a licensed doctor.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
On construction sites: hard hat, steel-toed boots, and when appropriate, gloves and safety glasses
At hospitals and other health-care facilities: immunization for the kinds of diseases that are likely to come through the door, especially those with the potential for arrival en masse.
Of course it is within your rights to refuse. But no safety equipment? No, you aren't allowed on-site in the areas where the relevant hazards exist. If that precludes you working, tough.
Seems reasonable to me. It's still a choice, even if it is a harsh one. But anyone who chose to work in health care should have realized years ago what might sometimes be necessary to do the job.
I'm not a doctor so could you please explain to me how kickstarting my immune system against a specific strain of disease will compromise my immune system? I'd understand if a vaccine was designed to fight off the disease on their own but they're not. They prime your own immune system to start building up the immunities on its own. At least, that's kinda how my doctor explained them to me. Maybe my doctor doesn't know as much about vaccines as you do.
Nothing wrong with hand washing. But... it sounds like you're a germ-o-phobic dumbass. Where's you're evidence that flu shots compromise your immune system? Links to the weekly world news don't count.
There's a difference between having a weak immune system and being allergic to a vaccine. For example, I've never had Whooping Cough (Pertussis), but if you give me the Pertussis vaccine I'll get extremely sick or die.
You're absolutely right about prevention being key, and handwashing is an extremely neglected, important way to fight disease (disclaimer: of _course_ i am not any kind of doctor).
But there's nothing wrong with getting a flu shot, and it can only improve matters in the vast majority of situations. There may be circumstances where getting a shot would be unhealthy, sure.
Forcing people to get one seems like it causes other, ethical, problems, though, which I didn't mention in my post which is now modded flamebait :)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that when the H1N1 flu vaccine is ready, the first people to get it should be children and young adults between age 6 months and 24 years. That strategy is expected to result in 59 million swine flu cases, 139,000 deaths and cost $67 billion. But there is a better way, according to researchers from Yale and Clemson universities. Flushot If vaccine doses were first distributed to children between age 5 and 19 and to adults age 30 to 39, there would be 15 million fewer infections and 31,000 fewer deaths, write mathematician Jan Medlock and epidemiologist Alison Galvani in Friday's edition of the journal Science. Their strategy would also save $14 billion, they calculate.
I'm a healthy skeptic. In both senses of the word. Never had a flu shot, because I don't buy into the hype - I do my research when something doesn't make sense, and this whole H1N1 crap has been exaggerated from the beginning.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
turns out that a lot of the numbers from around the world were similarly inflated. Also, people "coming down with H1N1" isn't the same as people dying from it. Millions die from the flu every year. Why the big panic for a flu that is no worse than average? Money!!!
Get people panicking, and you can profit from it. Ask DHS, Blackwater, etc.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
What do medical qualifications have to do with the fact that the seasonal flu vaccine is produced according to a prediction about epitopes that may or may not be present on the newly mutated form of the virus? A flu shot does not mean you won't get the flu, it means your body will react to certain antigens it encounters due to previous exposure. That's no guarantee that the flu virus will mutate as predicted. These predictions are made a year in advance. Try predicting the weather a year in advance, maybe no one would get rained on?
How did the GP get +5 informative?
Sure an ounce prevention is worth a pound of cure but the GP does not seem to recognise vaccines as prevention. My guess is the GP is a fit and arrogant man who is way too young to remeber polio or smallpox. I'm sure he will change his opinions after he wakes up one morning and experiences his first bout of pneumonia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And if you've had one, keep away from me - you're more, not less, likely to have a compromised immune system in the long run if you get annual flu shots.
May you please provide some evidence for this claim? If you are talking about antigenic sin, that only applies if you get the shot regularly, but then skip a year:
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?article_id=218392095
The flu shot is a crap-shoot in terms of effectiveness
From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113154000,
"If you are vaccinated with the injected vaccine, you have about a 70 percent chance of preventing influenza."
70% is a crap-shoot? Really?
latest virus is no more fatal than the average
About 36,000 a year die on average from the flu each year.
Anyway, the flu shot isn't a "crap-shoot" and an immune system destroyer as you claim... it is exactly the opposite, actually.
So you're planning on living in a bubble? No? Living in your casino's hotel room with Kleenex boxes on your feet? No? then just how do you plan on avoiding the flu?
In an ideal world your advice would work, but we don't live in an ideal world. People forget to wash their hands, or don't do it properly. They pick their noses cause it's fun. They'll paw your keyboard and mice because they just want to check their facebook and don't feel like tromping five feet to their own machine.
Stop pair programming? Huh, yeah sure you're PHB isn't going to tell you to man up and get on with it, is he now? Some magazine told him that it would increase productivity. If it's the choice between your sniffles and productivity, well you're gonna be sneezing a lot.
Keep sick people at home. That's a fantastic idea. You absolutely have my 150% unqualified support. Unfortunately sick people are still going to show up for work. It could be because they don't get sick leave. Or they don't think their flu is that bad. Or they've blown all their sick leave on guild raids. Or they're suffering under some messed up Calvinist work ethic that would drag their corpse into work if they could figure out some way of getting their dead limbs to work.
As for the rest of your anti-vac rant; where's your f@$#ing evidence? I'm sick of anti-vac propaganda that pulls suspicions and hysteria from its' arse and expects me to swallow it without thinking.
I'll be sticking to my annual flu shots thank you very much. And you can keep your vunerable immune system in your damn biohazard suit.
It's not just hospital workers (although that's what TFA is about.) Plenty of people are required to get a flu shot that you wouldn't expect need it.
The one that surprised me are local refinery workers. There is one refinery in our region that produces virtually all of the petroleum based fuel consumed locally. If the flu were to incapacitate 50% of the employees, the refinery would have to shut down. These are trained people needed to produce a critical product, and the refinery wouldn't have the time to train temps to take over for them. Pipelines don't exist to bring in refined products from elsewhere, and the rest of the nation's refining capacity would be strained to meet the demand.
Refinery workers are exposed to a lot of things you probably wouldn't want to be exposed to, but viruses aren't commonly among them. It'd probably be a great place to work if you wanted to avoid contact with other people.
John
Read what you wrote - "They prime your own immune system to start building up the immunities on its own." Unfortunately, antibodies aren't all that discrete. For example, the same antibody reaction that's been implicated in type one (juvenile) diabetes, where cows milk ends up leaking into the infants' bloodstream and provoking an antibody reaction; later on in life, the same antibodies start destroying the isles of langrahen; once enough are gone, no more insulin production.
Repeatedly injecting foreign substances to provoke immune responses has also been implicated in rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases later in life.
And no, doctors aren't necessarily up on the latest and greatest. Look how many decades they told people with peptic ulcers to see a shrink to learn to handle stress. The flat-out refused to believe that ulcers were caused by an infection. Ditto with certain forms of cancer and viruses. Heck, they thought they could "cure" gays and lesbians for over a century. Some even wanted to "cure" the "disease" of being left-handed up until a decade ago.
Even now, some doctors are saying thatyou should pick your nose and eat it, despite the fact that the boogers are there FOR YOUR PROTECTION, and picking your nose short-circuits that process, damages tissue (allowing direct access to the blood stream), and helps spread contaminants (stop wiping your snot all over the place - it's like a culture medium for bacteria).
In other words, doctors can also fall victim to simplistic logical fallacies. Or are you going to start picking your nose and chewing it because some doctor mistakenly thinks it's the right thing to do?
That was essentially Maher's ploy.
By interviewing Frist, a former Senator who was the Senate Republican leader during part of his time in office, instead of some other well-known physician, Maher interposed wholly unrelated politics into the discussion about whether or not to get an H1N1 vaccination. The end result is to convince some people who disagree with Frist on other issues to accept what is essentially a "reductio ad Hitlerum" argument: that if Bill Frist believes you should get a flu shot, then clearly, that's reason enough not to.
that is just natural selection.
True enough on the natural selection point. However, if there's a Tsunami heading to town and someone on the radio sarcastically suggests that today is a good day to surf, there's still an element of responsibility. Contributing to the death of stupid people is funny in theory, but tragic in practice.
Oh noes, the troll mods are all over this discussion... just repeating this because it's true:
Case. Fucking. Closed.
On our volunteer fire department. Particularly the EMS people. We see a lot of people with chronic respiratory diseases, COPD, and the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. The flu could kill them. Since they spend most of their time shut in, first responders are a possible vector.
So, yeah, we're getting flu shots and so are the ambulance and hospital people. If you're in the military, they vaccinate you against shit I've never even heard of.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
cancer virus cell base = your H1N1 Vaccine
And once again you're incoherent. Go away and die.
No, nice fallacious attack though. I think he's say instead of listening to a comedian you should listen to a doctor or a head of medicine. Or hell listen to the data.
next thing you know, they'll be forcing construction workers to wear hard hat and astronauts to wear space suits. It's a slippery slope people!
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I got all those side effects just from reading your idiotic post!
cancer virus
Virus - meaning of "agent that causes infectious disease"
Cancer is not infectious, ergo cancer is not a virus
This just in, tin foil hats cause the following:
* Stupid inane comments
* Uninformed decisions
* Leaping to conclusions
* Paranoia
* Annoia
* Repetitive posting in the hope that it won't be marked as a troll eventually
* Trolling
* A sub 50 IQ
* The inability to reason
You do realise that the source that you have cited is a website called "Fluscam" right? When making a reasoned and informed decision on anything you must, I repeat MUST, consult an unbiased source. Visiting "fluscam" for any information regarding influenza vaccines would be akin to asking a creationist how old the world is - you are not going to get an informed, intelligent answer.
I am not stubborn. I am right!
It sounds like he's allergic to horse serum. Whooping cough doesn't have anything to do with that, so it would probably a much lesser risk. (Still, he shouldn't be in a line of work where he would be likely to act as a vector.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Apparently someone else has been into the Jim Beam mouthwash.
*smile*
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Those of us that work in IT, and never got to the hospitals proper (my guys work in an office building away from the hospital and patient care areas), arer still required to take the seasonal flu. H1N1, is actually not required as of yet (there are several nurses unions fighting it). The reason we are required, is that in no way can you predict who will be in contact with patients.. for example half of my guys never leave the building.. several (including me) have to have meetings sometimes on the hospital campus... if I get exposed, then I, in turn expose my guys... Bottom line - I hate the flu shot... never took it until this year when it was made mandatory, and frankly the only reason I did that is I like my job. Tose in Healthcare that do not want to take the vac, are free to leave, and I think they should...
Actually, there's a bit of confusion. The H1N1 swine flu that they're vaccinating against (as soon as the vaccines are prepared) isn't that much worse than the ordinary seasonal flu. It's the H5N1 that's the reputed killer. And that one isn't spreading widely. (Doesn't seem to be spreading widely?) So this seems to mean that we currently have 3 flu strains in circulation.
The problem is that if someone gets multiple flus at the same time, the genes are likely to do some swapping. This could easily result in a flu that spreads as easily as the seasonal flu and is as deadly as H5N1 (bird flu). So this year it's especially important to keep the level of flu in the population as low as possible.
Well, at least that's how I understand it. If someone connected with the health profession could correct any errors, it would probably be beneficial.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I guess all I'm really saying is that in the debate about vaccination -- and I don't even think there's enough evidence to support a reasonable anti-vaccination position -- a discussion between Bill Maher and Bill Frist adds nothing. You might as well have Cheech and Chong talking about it.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA. With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
As for your scary-sounding list, yes, it's a list of possible adverse effects that a person may experience - but it is not an indication of likelihood. No medication is without risk, but in general, people take the medication because the benefits outweigh the risks by a significant margin.
To put it in a grossly exaggerated, probably flawed slashdot-style analogy, the documented possible side effects of flying in a plane are motion sickness, legionnaire's disease, food poisoning, lice infestation, mental anguish, deep vein thrombosis, alcohol abuse, insomnia, halitosis, delayed departure, poverty, or becoming part of a suicide mission that turns your plane into a bomb. But more likely than any of those you'll get to your destination with very little lasting impact on your personal health or safety - as long as you remember that stupid 4-1-1 rule.
Why is H1N1 a big deal? Since you're here at Slashdot, you probably have some computer background, so I suggest you read this. Money quote:
Some of these mutations make no difference; others render the virus harmless; and quite possibly, some render the virus much more dangerous. Since viruses are replicated and distributed in astronomical quantities, the chance that this little hack could end up occurring naturally is in fact quite high. This is part of the reason, I think, why the health officials are so worried about H1N1: we have no resistance to it, and even though it’s not quite so deadly today, it’s probably just a couple mutations away from being a much bigger health problem.
It's good to be a skeptic, but when you're too "skeptical" to accept what experts tell you (oh, wait, you're a biologist specializing in human disease?), you're willfully ignoring the obvious.
Just so you know, and not really related to 'swine flu'.
I recently noticed how much more encumbered my years are now that I don't get regular flu shots. As a part of my work in the past, I got flu shots yearly and seemingly never got the flu. I never noticed how 'good' I had it until the last 4 years where I've been a student and haven't gotten the shot.... And so now I spend at least one, if not 2, weeks out of the year suffering.
It took me 4 years to realize how good I had it back then and to take note that I might benefit happily and greatly from a $16 flu shot.
"A flu shot does not mean you won't get the flu [it is based on] predictions are made a year in advance"
Yeah, but they usually work. Have you ever had a flu? I'd rather a prick on the arm and a bit of nausea for a day, even if it wasn't 100% likely to stop the flu.
I'll agree that the swine flu is bad, but not catastrophic (it might mutate into something really deadly over the next 5 years, just like the Spanish one but the vaccine will be useless), and that big pharma will do anything for a buck, but it's still worth getting vaccinated.
If you didn't question medical advice, you would be a drugged out wreck of a human.
I have to have a tetanus shot and have First Aid, CPR, AED certs. Those are a condition of my employment. No shots, no certs, no paycheck.
I also have to wear steel toe boots, a hardhat, and a dayglo safety vest if I'm on a job site.
Let's face it, if you work in a high-risk area, your employer would be negligent in *not* requiring you to take reasonable and practical precautions.
If you don't like, the door swings both ways.
Ashland, Oregon, is a small town full of nutjobs near where I live. It's a college town, and I recently read that nearly 30% of the town has taken the religious exemption from vaccinating their kids. (Trust me, it's not because they're fundamentalist christians. It's because they're crystal-licking new age whacks. Probably a very high average level of education, just not sanity.)
30%. That's crazy, and kids will end up dying from whooping cough because of it. I have a libertarian worldview, and don't like the idea of the government mandating vaccinations. But on the other hand, when people are skipping frigging POLIO shots because of their DEMONSTRABLY WRONG beliefs, they are putting entire communities at risk. I'm torn. Now, about the H1N1 vaccine, I'm not; it should be voluntary, and I'm voluntarily not getting it, nor are my kids. The risk is overblown, and getting the disease would only be a mild inconvenience, same as any flu.
Well, how about some data from the Australian Government? They're not renowned for inflating the numbers of people affected by a disease.
- 1 in 199.something (ok, call it 200) people who have been confirmed to have the swine flu have died from it.
- 1 in 7.64 people confirmed to have swine flu has been sick enough to require hospital treatment.
I dug this up while I was responding to a post on a forum, where a guy posted a link to an anti-vaccine video, which was referring to the 1976 swine flu vaccine in the US. In that case, 25 people died as complications from the vaccine, and about 500 more got Guillain-Barré syndrome.
But considering they vaccinated slightly north of 48 million people for swine flu in 1976 (48,161,019 according to Wikipedia), that's a death rate of 1 in 1,926,440, and a serious-side-effect rate of 1 in 90,528.
I'll take those odds over swine flu's 1-in-200 lethality rate any day! (Or even 1 in 500 if you assume for every confirmed case there are two or three who get a mild version and don't get tested)
To make it perfectly clear: For every person who died from the 1976 swine flu vaccine, it's possible that nearly ten thousand would have died from the swine flu itself, if not for the vaccine.
That's just deaths. Ignoring non-fatal complications, like having to have both of your feet amputated (and that was an otherwise healthy young person - you know, like you're claiming to be).
Now, I understand that modern influenza vaccines don't have anywhere near the rate of serious side effects as that 1976 swine flu vaccine. You'd think we'd hear about it if they did, considering there are literally hundreds of millions of doses given each and every year. But even if they did, they would still be saving tens of thousands of lives.
Another consideration - most of the people who have died from swine flu in Australia have died despite the best care modern medicine can provide. Some of the people who survived only did so thanks to lung machines, because their lungs are so filled with fluid that they can't breathe, at all.
That's with less than 1 in 600 of the general population getting the disease. What happens if as little as 10% of the population of Australia comes down with swine flu?
Well, then, we could expect to see something like 2.2 million cases, which means 290,000 people would get sick enough to require hospital treatment. In a country that only has a total of 80,000 hospital beds.
I'll let you do the math, but I suspect that 1-in-200 death rate might climb a little, and instead of 10,000 dead, we might see several times that. If it was really virulent and infected a quarter, or half, or even the whole population? Then it's 1918 all over again. There just aint that many anti-virals around, and there definitely aren't enough hospital beds.
And that's why our governments are so damn keen on getting us vaccinated.
"151 dead from Swine Flu in Mexico", on recounting, turned out to be 6.
I don't know where your non-cited figure of "6" deaths from the original swine flu outbreak in Mexico came from, but maybe it was from a misinterpretation of a report detailing the deaths of 7 patients at a single tertiary care hospital in Mexico city during a single month. The New England Journal of Medicine article that detailed the fate of the 98 patients acutely ill with the swine flu in that hospital at that time also references that 85 people in Mexico were known to have died as of May out of 4910 confirmed cases, a fatality rate of 1.7%.
Fortunately only Mexico during the initial outbreak reported such a high fatality rate. This is very fortunate as almost no young person in the world had any kind of immunity to this strain. In all likelihood when you come down with it you will be 'lucky' enough to only have to suffer a few days of bed-bound misery.
I'm a healthy skeptic.
Skepticism is good, but you've jumped way beyond that into conspiracy theories and paranoia.
I'll stick with preventative measures, as opposed to a shot that may or may not be effective this season
Doing nothing does not count as a preventative measure. It is true that usually with the seasonal flu vaccine scientists must guess months beforehand what strains to put in the vaccine and since they don't always guess right the vaccine is usually only about 70% effective, but as for pandemic H1N1 the vaccine is an excellent match and it should give almost everyone who gets it protection.
There's an analysis of Bill Maher's anti-medicine stance on the Science-Based Medicine blog. It points out how he's considered an informed "skeptic" due to his anti-religious views, despite him embracing medical quackery.
Actually, the cafeteria is not the same food establishment that prepared meals for patients. They are generally close together but separate with separate staffing because the food for the patients need to meet strict dietary requirements where cafeteria food doesn't. Most hospital cafeterias are not large enough to feed all the patients in the hospital.
As for radiology, well, I already said the janitors are wearing sanitary protections and using disinfectants. They also do not go in while the patients are there. It's called privacy and there are some HIPPA concerns too. A hospital is not like your grade school.
As for the hallways, in the areas I mentioned, they are controlled and access is limited for the most part. This is to control drug seekers and thieves as well as someone wanting to interfere with diagnostic results for insurance fraud or something.
I've worked in a hospital too. In fact, I actually worked in 5 different hospitals owned by the same parent company. We all had to use the service elevators which was controlled access by key card, there were service entrances we were required to enter and exit from, and for the most part, I wouldn't ever see any patients at all. There was two notable exceptions where a guy who was on the crazy floor got permission to smoke and the order lost control of him on the way back up. He was hiding in an access closet. The other time was when a patient learned he was being charged with something by the cops, managed to escape monitoring and wondered through the building with a key card he took from an administrative assistant looking for an exit that wasn't monitored. There are provisions in place for both of those scenarios and it isn't likely that it would happen again unless hospitals have changed somewhat in the last 5 years or so.
Of course my experience is within one chain of hospitals, it doesn't mean all of them are like that but I'm not sure why they wouldn't be. Maintenance and IT simple are not around patients or there is no need for them to be though.
You sir, are not a healthy skeptic, to quote you from another post:
This is woo woo non-science , i.e. you are full of shit, please try better next time you want to pose as a healthy skeptic.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
You don't look anything like this , do you?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Look through the thread. Read the link I posted (along with quotes) from The Lancet. You know, that peer-reviewed, internationally respected medical journal. The article that talks about specific cases of vaccine-caused auto-immune diseases ...
Then you can apologize.
Then you can read some of the other links I posted in this thread, including to the study that apparently shows that if you had previous flu vaccines, you're twice as likely to catch H1N1. And the WHO admitting that polio in Nigeria is now being caused by a mutated polio vaccine.
And other references to how most people born prior to 1957 already have better immunity than the vaccine confers - which explains why older people in good health don't need to fear H1N1.
Vaccines don't always work as intended, they can have side effects, including causing the very diseases they were supposed to cure (we ignored this from our experience with animals to our regret - for example, the leptospirosis vaccine your vet recommends is the #1 cause of leptospirosis in dogs).
Some vaccines are great - like the smallpox vaccine. A disease with a stable viral structure. An easy target. Flu is not the same, and vaccines, absent other considerations such as basic hygiene and health (like washing your hands, not coughing on other people, eating properly) is not going to be the cure-all you seem to think it will be.
This simply means that you willfully misunderstand statistics. A vaccine that saves millions of lives at the risk of a few hundred is a justifiable risk. The same logic applies to warfare: we sacrifice the lives of the few to save the many. It is painful and regrettable, but it must be done.
That is a FAR cry from saying that vaccines "cause disease" or that this is a manufactured pandemic to make money.
At least 62% of the U.S. population is under the age of 45. How does conferred immunity from the 1957 asian flu help them? What about the world?
You may have only gotten the flu once. The plural of anecdote is not data. Epidemiology is data, and it argues against you.
If your car never fails in the 10 years that you drive it, does it mean that mechanics are perpetrating fraud? Think about it.
Also, it appears that the oft-repeated "36,000 people die from the flu every year" number is also bogus, being a bad extrapolation from a set of people who are already seriously ill, and not numbers taken from actual sampling the population at large. The actual toll may be well under 1,000. So much for any epidemological studies that support big numbers with bad guestimates instead of hard counts.
Anyway, on to your other remarks ...
So even you admit that for at least, say, 30% of the population (I'll let you keep 8% for the chronically ill), the vaccine is not really needed, since they already are immune to swine flu from past exposure? Well, that's a start.
So how about removing the other low-risk groups - those over 5 years, under 6 months, the non-pregnant women? That's the vast majority of the population who simply aren't all that much at risk.
I'll give you the obese, because they ARE at risk, but that can't be more than ... oops, we're talking America ... 67% of the population over 20 are either overweight or obese. Fuck, why are you people even worried about swine flu when you've got a pandemic of excess flab? Okay, let's see - morbidly obese - 3%. I'll give you the fatties. Pick a reasonable number for the number of pregnant women, and the number of kids between 6 months and 5 years old ... both combined, along with the Lardos certainly won't bring you to even 20% of the population. ALL the under-5 is only 7%, and if we take 10% of the people between 20 and 45 and say they're pregnant, that still only yields 3.5%, and we have to remove half of them, because they're men ... which gives us 1.75% of the population who are pregnant (still high, but who cares).
So, between the morbidly obese (3%), the pregnant women (1.75%), and ALL the kids under 5 (7%), you're only at 11.75% of the population. How is giving the other 88.25% of the population a vaccine they don't need going to help the situation? And if the virus mutates, the vaccine is useless anyway. Now, since it's more likely that the vaccine will mutate to a weaker form, as happened in the past, people will crow about "how the vaccine worked", when it did nothing of the sort.
There is NO justification for hyping vaccines to people who aren't at risk. That's 88.25% of the population who are being buffaloed into doing something that only profits the drug companies, as opposed to simpler (but less glamourous) solutions that will also help prevent them from catching other variants of the flu, and colds.
And what about the latest study (look elsewhere in the thread) that shows that if you had a flu shot in the past, you double your chances of catching H1N1? Double! A study with 13 million subjects is not anecdotal - it's far more subjects than the other studies to date, which may explain why we're only making the connection now.
As for the pandemic, it IS bullshit. 7 deaths in more than half a year. Even a death a day would not be a "serious pandemic", and we're nowhere near that.
Think we could have practically wiped out polio or smallpox in this country if we just kicked back and waited to see what happened?
No, but the case for these vaccines was clear since both small pox and polio are incredibly serious diseases resulting in high mortality rates or permanent handicap. For these diseases the rate of serious complications from the vaccine is far, far lower than the rate of serious consequences from the disease so it is very clear that you should vaccinate.
The problem is that we are now developing vaccines for diseases which have far, far lower rates of complications and fatalities. An example is chicken pox. The rate of complications from the vaccine is comparable to the rate of complications from the disease, the WHO recommends it mainly as an economic measure (stops parents missing work to look after sick kids) and since the vaccine wears off you have to have booster shots or risk getting shingles as an adult which is a serious disease.
Swine flu seems to be between the two. The disease can sometimes be serious but the vaccine has had no large scale testing. Hence, since I'm not an "at risk" category I'm waiting this one out at least until a while after the mass vaccination has started to see if there are an complications from the vaccine. Once the guinea pigs have shown it is safe I'll get my shot then.
First off, from a public health point of view it's perfectly reasonable to insist that *all* nurses, MDs, and hospital support staff are vaccinated against most diseases that hospitals are likely to encounter, and against *all* diseases that threaten to become a pandemic (and for which vaccines are available).
The reason is very simple: health-care workers will get into contact with large numbers of weakened patients (old, infirm, very young, diseased, suffering from trauma etc.) and you don't want them to:
- (a) become infected themselves (because they weren't vaccinated) and then infect scores of vulnerable patients because they are carriers
- (b) become unavailable for work due to illness right when they are needed most.
So, by and large and taking one thing with another, we are better off without health-care workers who don't wish to be vaccinated. This simple consideration consideration is enough to warrant *mandatory* vaccination for all health-care workers.
The risk to at-risk individuals (and health-care workers) from the disease itself is much greater than the risk from a vaccine, so (statistically speaking) the only rational course of action is to take the vaccine.
The only thing that I think might be done differently is to dismiss such health-care workers as refuse vaccination. But then again, what do you do with people who can't be kept in their present function?
This is only partly true (only a very small part) and much less so now.
The drug companies did sponsor some thin "throw-away" quick reference books on narrow topics. With the crackdown on drug companies, this is much less true now.
Drug companies didn't and still don't fund or write any of the major medical reference texts that are used primarily. They would sometimes buy them to give away to doctors (again, this happens much less now), but they didn't have input on the content. I've edited major medical texts, and know the editors of other leading texts, and know that drug company concerns had nothing to do with the content.
But most disease requires immunization rates of about 85% to confer herd immunity.
There are well documented cases of small religious communities not vaccinating there kids then having perfectly predictable numbers of kids dying of measles and other preventable disease.
Measles in Wales
Outbreak of measles in Religious communties
Not vaccinating your kids is a terrible decision that puts them at risk of permanent crippling injury and death.
Anarchists never rule
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA.
Yes, but they are not in Europe. It is still a concern.
Given that the article was about a U.S. hospital, and the bulk of the concerns in the comments were about U.S. vaccination policy, the fact that adjuvants are allowed in Europe really didn't warrant comment. Those vaccines aren't coming here unless the pandemic worsens significantly and there is no way to manufacture additional adjuvant-free vaccine.
With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
Sure about that? First of it's a ridiculous argument, indeed the level of mercury in tuna are alarmingly high, it doesn't make it right. And regardless, you would have to eat a heck of a lot of tuna to equal even one flu shot.
The FDA lists the mean methylmercury content of canned albacore tuna to be .353ppm. That means 6 ounces (170g) of tuna contains approximately 59.5mcg of methylmercury, or slightly more than a 1mg dose of flu vaccine.
The point IS salient becuase despite that level, the FDA has indicated that tuna is safe for children to eat up to 6 ounces per week.
Let me demonstrate and I will give references. The Flu vaccine contains 25mcg of mercury (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/acip/dosage.htm) this is the seasonal flu link, the h1n1 contains the same amount. Oh sure , you can request the single dose without the mercury, but unless you do, your probably getting the multi-dose. The safe level of mercury is 0.1 mcg per kg body weight, (http://www.gotmercury.org/article.php?id=1169) So a 68kg (~150lb) person safe limit is 6.8mcg per day.
Kind of. What you're quoting is a reference dose, and it's a rate with a time component, not just a simple level. The RfD that you're quoting is the EPA's reference dose, and yes, it's .01mcg/kg body weight per day. So on one day, your 68kg person would ingest a higher than recommended amount, but if the person avoid tuna melts for the next week, his reference dose is back within the EPA's recommendation.
It's also worth noting that there are several reference doses issued by different agencies; the EPA's is the most conservative. The World Health Organization has the highest reference dose of 1.6mcg/kg/week of body weight.
So you just shot almost 4 times the safe limit for an average adult directly into your blood stream.
As a point of clarification, vaccines are injected into the muscle, not directly into the blood stream.
Worse the age group for fluzone is 6months or older... a large 6-7m infant might be 10kg as a high avg, that 1mcg safe limit... great you just shot up your infant with 25 times the safe levels.
Of course, that concern is why they also make the vaccine available in preservative-free doses. It's also why pediatricians will discuss the risks and benefits with parents.
This is on top most people already being near or above the safe daily limits taken in from water and foods. Looking at (http://www.csgnetwork.com/hgqtycalc.html) , eating a can of tuna for the same 150lb person a week is just slightly higher than what is considered safe levels. Don't forget children are to get 3 shots, 1 seasonal and 2 h1n1...
With the exception of broken lightbulbs, thermometers, and dental fillings, you've just outlined the major vectors f
I currently work for an electricity transmission and distribution company. The company policy regarding swine flu is to track anyone who has been exposed because their acquiried immunity may be critical in keeping services operating in the event of the second wave of infections. We have documented procedures based on keeping operator shifts separate to minimise cross infections between teams of operators in key positions.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World