Winter Is Flu Season, but Maybe It Doesn’t Have to Be (Source: Los Angeles Times)
From the article:
"It’s very clear who is transmitting the flu, and how they are connected," says Dr. Ira M. Longini Jr., a statistician at Emory. "It is very clearly schoolchildren."
Dr. Longini, Dr. Halloran and their colleagues recently employed a mathematical model to estimate what might happen if 60 percent of American children and adolescents got flu shots. They found that flu deaths in people aged 65 and older could fall to 6,600 a year from 34,000. Hospitalizations could drop to 8,000 a year from 43,000. And the annual cost of caring for older people who get the flu could be cut from today’s $473 million to just $90 million.
Of course, it would be nice to know for sure that giving flu shots to children would stanch an epidemic. Dr. Halloran, for one, would like to see a national study, giving the vaccine to children in some places but not others and seeing what happens.
But… there may be another, easier way.
A few years ago, the province of Ontario in Canada began offering free flu shots to everyone, including children. Now scientists are starting to look at what happened to the spread of the disease there.