And now, some heartening news in the global health world: Injuries are down by a pretty big chunk.

“Injury” in this case encompasses everything from car accidents and falls to suicides and gunshot wounds. Since 1990, the world has managed to cut down the number deaths and disabilities caused by all these factors by a third, according to a report published Thursday in the British Medical Journal.

“As for what has brought about this change, we can only speculate,” says Theo Vos, a professor of global health at the University of Washington and the report’s senior author. “For example, we’ve seen a huge decline in suicide in China, whereas in India that is not the case.” Going forward, researchers will have to dig beyond the statistics to figure out why some countries are doing better than others.

But while the stats look good overall, he says, “there are a number of parts of the world that are lagging behind,” Vost says. In many developing countries, road accidents are up — especially in parts of South America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In South Africa, for example, over 13,000 people died in road accidents in 2010.

That’s likely because more people in the developing world are moving into cities and frequenting not-so-safe city roads, Vos says. “It’s true that cars are probably safer today than they were 20, 30 years ago,” he notes. “But maybe some of these countries in southern Africa, West Africa and South America need to see what they can do to improve road safety.”

To do that, countries that are lagging behind need to look to places like Sao Paolo, Brazil. says Claudia Adriazola, who researches urban transportation and road safety at the World Resources Institute. The city’s mayor has reduced speed limits across the city and added more sidewalks and bike lanes. “Maybe more cities can start doing similar things,” she says.

And maybe global health organizations can start thinking differently about how they allocate their funds. Dollars traditionally go to combating infectious diseases like AIDS and Ebola. But improving road safety as well as emergency medical care is also critical, says Michael Haglund, a neurosurgeon at Duke University who has been helping train surgeons in East Africa.

“I totally get that some of these developing countries have to first take care of things like malaria, tuberculosis and HIV,” Haglund says. “But now we’re starting to reign in some of those infectious diseases.”

If developing countries started allocating a fraction of what they spend trying to contain and cure those diseases into improving surgical care, Haglund notes, they’d be able to reduce the number of preventable deaths from car accidents, falls and other common injuries.

“Once you’re injured, if you’re in the U.S. you’re probably in the emergency room right away, within minutes,” Haglund says. “Imagine you get injured in northern Uganda and it takes 12 hours to get to the nearest hospital for surgery. A simple neck fracture or a blood clot can easily be fixed, but only if you’re able to treat it quickly.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

The rate of avoidable complications affecting patients in hospitals leveled off in 2014, after three years of declines, according to a federal report released Tuesday.

Hospitals have averted many types of injuries where clear preventive steps have been identified, but they still struggle to avert complications with broader causes and less clear-cut solutions, government and hospital officials said.

There were at least 4 million infections and other potentially avoidable injuries in hospitals last year, the study estimated. That translates to a preventable problem in about 12 of every 100 hospital stays.

Among the most common complications that were measured — each occurring a quarter million times or more — were bedsores, falls, bad reactions to drugs used to treat diabetes and kidney damage that develops after contrast dyes are injected through catheters to help radiologists take images of blood vessels.

The frequency of hospital complications last year was 17 percent lower than in 2010 but the same as in 2013, indicating that some patient safety improvements made by hospitals and the government are sticking. But the lack of improvement raised concerns that it is becoming harder for hospitals to further reduce the chances that a patient may be harmed during a visit.

“We are still trying to understand all the factors involved, but I think the improvements we saw from 2010 to 2013 were very likely the low-hanging fruit, the easy problems to solve,” said Dr. Richard Kronick, director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, or AHRQ, which conducted the study.

The Obama administration has been focusing on lowering the rates of medical infections and injuries as it tracks a slew of patient safety initiatives created by the 2010 federal health law. Those include Medicare penalties for poor-performing hospitals, wider use of electronic records to help track patient care and prevent mistakes, and grants to collaborations of medical providers formed to improve the quality of patient care and identify the best ways of addressing each type of problem.

The AHRQ report calculated national rates for 27 specific complications by extrapolating from 30,000 medical cases that officials examined. Decreases in infections, medicine reactions and other complications since 2010 have resulted in 2.1 million fewer incidents of harm, 87,000 fewer deaths and $20 billion in health care savings, the report concluded.

“Those are real people that are not dying, getting infections or other adverse events in the hospital,” said Dr. Patrick Conway, chief medical officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Some of the most significant progress was made in lowering the number of infections from central lines inserted into veins — down 72 percent from 2010. Medical researchers have proven that these infections can be virtually eliminated if doctors and nurses follow a clear set of procedures.

Infections from urinary catheters decreased by 38 percent and surgical site infections dropped by 18 percent. In all three cases, the reductions exceeded the goals set by the administration. Conway noted that hospitals had a financial motivation to cut these infections as they are used to determine whether hospitals get Medicare bonuses and penalties each year.

However, hospitals have not made headway in trimming the numbers of falls or pneumonia cases in patients breathing through mechanical ventilators, the report found. And the rates of adverse drug reactions and complications during childbirth were higher than what the administration estimated they should be for 2014.

Conway said that complications are difficult to address because they involve tradeoffs that can cause other problems. For instance, he said, hospitals have to balance efforts to reduce falls with the need to help unstable patients improve their ability to walk. “We’ve got to work with providers to figure out what’s the sweet spot that can keep mobilization occurring but decrease the rate of falls,” he said.

Even though overall complication rates were flat, the report found that some types of injuries became less common in 2014. One was the number of blood clots that form after surgery and travel to the lung; those rates dropped by 30 percent in a year.

In some areas, the report is more optimistic about infection declines than is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks the same infections but uses different methods and different years of comparison. The CDC has reported that urinary tract infections caused by catheters became slightly more prevalent through 2013, while the AHRQ method has found a substantial drop, said Dr. Jennifer Meddings, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan Health System who studies hospital infections. “This is what’s very confusing to hospitals,” she said. “Different data gets picked in different reports.”

Maulik Joshi, an executive at the American Hospital Association, predicted that complications will become even rarer in future years. “Hospitals are working on projects that are just not reflected in these data points,” he said.

But a few conditions became more prevalent in 2014. Infections from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, known as MRSA, increased by 55 percent to an estimated 17,000 incidents last year. The number of times a catheter punctured a femoral artery during an angiography increased by 25 percent to 74,000, the report estimated.

“We think we addressed a lot of the areas where there was a strong evidence base on how to improve patient safety,” Conway said. “We’ll now have to tackle that next wave that has multiple causes.”

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Women who have an abnormal mammogram should stay vigilant for cancer for for the next decade, even when follow-up tests fail to detect cancer, a study released Wednesday finds.

That’s because there’s a “modest” risk that cancer will develop during the next decade, says lead author Louise M. Henderson of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill.

The absolute increase in risk amounts to about 1 additional cancer in every 100 women who have a false positive mammogram over a 10-year period, she says.

But when put another way, the numbers may appear alarming. The study divided women into two groups — those who got additional imaging and those who also got biopsies.

Women with an abnormal screening mammogram had a 39 percent higher risk of cancer if they got additional imaging that turned out to be negative, too. That’s compared with women who were truly negative and never developed breast cancer.

For women who got biopsies that turned out negative, the chance of cancer was increased by 76 percent over the next 10 years.

“We don’t want women to read this and feel worried,” Henderson says. Instead, the findings should be considered one more “useful tool” when weighing all the other factors that might be raising a particular woman’s risk, such as age, race, breast density and family history of breast cancer.

Henderson says the study wasn’t designed to figure out why a falsely positive mammogram is associated with an increased cancer risk.

It’s possible, she says, that the increased risk “could be the fact that the radiologist sees an abnormal pattern that’s not cancerous, but it’s a radio-graphic marker,” and it could be that this is a precursor to some subsequent cancer diagnosis.

The study, done at several leading universities, looked back at more than 2.2 million screening mammograms considered to be false alarms between 1994 and 2009. It was published Wednesday in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. The mammograms were done in 1.3 million women, ages 40 to 74.

Earlier studies have had conflicting results. But the size of this study makes researchers more confident that whatever is going on is a true phenomenon and not chance, says Dr. Richard Wender, chief cancer control officer of the American Cancer Society.

“If you’ve had a false positive, that is a risk factor,” he says, “so it’s very important that a woman stay up to date with regular mammography.”

As it is now, Wender says, at least one-third of women who should be getting routinely screened for breast cancer are falling behind schedule.

The cancer society created controversy in October, when it changed its guidelines to recommend that regular screening start at age 45. Other groups recommend starting earlier, at age 40, and some say it’s OK to wait until age 50.

Studies have shown that the chance of getting an abnormal screening mammogram that is falsely positive is about 50 percent over the course of 10 years. That often leads to further testing, including more mammograms, possible ultrasound exams, MRIs and even biopsies.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Download

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Many primary care practitioners will be a little poorer next year because of the expiration of a health law program that has been paying them a 10 percent bonus for caring for Medicare patients. Some say the loss may trickle down to the patients, who could have a harder time finding a doctor or have to wait longer for appointments. But others say the program has had little impact on their practices, if they were aware of it at all.

The incentive program began in 2011 and was designed to address disparities in Medicare reimbursements between primary care physicians and specialists. It distributed $664 million in bonuses in 2012, the most recent year that figures are available, to roughly 170,000 primary care practitioners, awarding each an average of $3,938, according to a 2014 report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission.

Although that may sound like a small adjustment, it can be important to a primary care practice, says Dr. Wanda Filer, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. “It’s not so much about the salary as it’s about the practice expense,” she explains. “Family medicine runs on very small margins, and sometimes on negative margins if they’re paying for electronic health records, for example. Every few thousand makes a difference.”

Doctors in family medicine, internal medicine and geriatrics are eligible for the bonuses, as are nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

Medicare generally pays lower fees for primary care visits to evaluate and coordinate patients’ care than for procedures that specialists perform. The difference is reflected in physician salaries. Half of primary care physicians made less than $241,000 in 2014, while for specialists the halfway mark was $412,000, according to the Medical Group Management Association’s annual provider compensation survey.

The effect the bonus program is larger on practices with more Medicare patients. Dr. Andy Lazris estimates 90 percent of the patients that his five-practitioner practice in Columbia, Md., treats are on Medicare.

“When the bonus payments started, it was a pretty big deal for us,” Lazris says. The extra $85,000 they received annually allowed them to hire two people to deal with the administrative requirements for being part of an accountable care organization and to help the practice incorporate two new Medicare programs related to managing patients’ chronic diseases or overseeing their moves from a medical facility to home.

Next year, if they can’t make up the lost bonus money by providing more services, it’ll mean a pay cut of $17,000 per practitioner, Lazris says.

The incentive program was an effort to address shortcomings in Medicare’s system of paying providers mostly a la carte for services, which tends to undervalue primary care providers’ ongoing role in coordinating patients’ care.

The expiration of the Medicare incentive program comes on the heels of a similar bonus program for Medicaid primary care services that ended in 2014, says Dr. Wayne J. Riley, president of the American College of Physicians, a professional organization for internists.

“There will be some physicians who say they can’t take any more Medicare patients,” Riley predicts.

An attorney for an advocacy group for Medicare beneficiaries says they support the bonus payments and hope physicians won’t shut them out.

“We don’t have any evidence to show that primary care docs will stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries without the payment bump,” says David Lipschutz, a senior policy attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

The vast majority of nonpediatrician primary care doctors accept patients who are covered by Medicare, according to a national survey by the Commonwealth Fund and the Kaiser Family Foundation. But while 93 percent take Medicare, a smaller percentage, 72 percent, accept new Medicare patients. [Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation.]

Not all primary care practitioners will miss the incentive program, according to the Commonwealth/KFF survey.

Only a quarter of those surveyed said they received a bonus payment; half didn’t know the program existed.

Of physicians who were aware of and received Medicare bonus payments, 37 percent said it made a small difference in their ability to serve their Medicare patients, and 5 percent said it made a big difference. However, nearly half—48 percent—said it made no difference at all.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Two years ago my mom fell at home and ended up being admitted to the ICU with four broken ribs and internal injuries. She was lucky. After two weeks in the hospital and a few more in a rehab unit she was back home, using her new blue walker to get around.

I think of that each Thanksgiving as I make pies just the way she taught me, grateful that she’s still with us and that she’s told us how she wants to die

Before she was discharged, Mom signed a POLST form, short for a Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment. I’d heard of advance directives, which spell out the kind of medical care a person would want if they become too ill to communicate those wishes. But I’d never heard of POLST.

In Oregon, where my mother lives, it’s a one-page piece of pink paper that bluntly asks if you want to have CPR performed if your heart stops and you’re not breathing. Three other check boxes ask how much medical intervention you want: going to the hospital and an intensive care unit; perhaps the hospital but no ICU; or skip the hospital altogether. A third question asks if you want to be fed through a tube. That’s it.

Because it’s signed by a doctor or other provider, a POLST has teeth. It overrides the legal obligation of an EMT or a hospital to provide CPR and other emergency care that for old and sick people can lead to a long, miserable hospital stay.

“It’s not for healthy people,” says Dr. Susan Tolle, director of the Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health Science University. Instead, it’s for someone who is aware that they may soon die.

“We would encourage doctors to reach out to patients if they would not be surprised if they died in the coming year,” Tolle says, “or if they had advanced frailty. The little old lady hunched over their walker, that’s the definition of frailty.”

That’s also the definition of my 92-year-old mom. She can still beat me handily at hearts, but she’s physically weaker each time I see her. “Do everything” is the default mode for American medicine, but that all-out approach often doesn’t serve the very old well.

CPR works only about 10 percent of the time in the general population, Tolle told me, and it’s even less successful in a frail old lady.

First, if someone at that age collapses, it’s usually because there’s a serious medical problem like a heart attack or stroke. And performing CPR on someone with osteoporosis breaks ribs rather than circulating blood. “That isn’t walking off the film set looking good with your hair nicely combed,” Tolle says. “That’s going to the ICU on a ventilator.”

In studies, Tolle, who helped develop the POLST form, has found that just about 12 percent of permanent nursing home residents would want to go to an ICU. “Most say, ‘I want to go to the hospital to get the easy things fixed, but I don’t want the ICU. I don’t want CPR.’ “

POLST forms work well in nursing homes, where they’re often taped on a resident’s bathroom door. But they can be harder to put in force when people are still living in the community.

Oregon has an electronic POLST registry that EMTs and hospitals can check remotely. But only 18 states have POLST programs in place, though many more have them in the works. Most have no registry, meaning that someone intent on having the directions on their POLST form followed would need to wear a medical alert bracelet.

Some members of the disability community have questioned whether POLST is being too broadly applied. Rather than give people more control over end-of-life medical care, they say, it could mean interpreting “disabled” to mean “on death’s door”.

“Our concern is that it’s being used with non-terminal people,” says John Kelly, a 54-year-old quadriplegic who lives in Boston. He was taken aback when a nurse showed up with Massachusetts’ version of the form, called a MOLST. “I joke that I’ve got my pink MOLST on the fridge, and I’m afraid that the firemen will come in and glance at the refrigerator and say, OK, he’s got [a do-not-resuscitate order]. They interpret it as meaning no treatment at all.”

POLST is almost certainly inappropriate for someone disabled but otherwise healthy, Tolle says. “People are handing out the form a little too early sometimes, and we want to push back on that,” she says. “It’s for people who we can say are in the winter of their lives. They have advanced illness and frailty. They have declining health.”

Since her fall my mom has been quite clear about what treatments she doesn’t want. I realize that her desires may change and that the POLST form should then change, too. And I know we’ll be talking about this more, even though I have a hard time thinking about it without tearing up.

Family gatherings like Thanksgiving can be a good time for adult children to ask aging parents about their wishes for end-of-life care, and whether those wishes would be best expressed through an advance directive or a POLST. A number of groups offer crib sheets with questions that aren’t entirely scary, like “Would you rather die at home or in a hospital?”

It’s also a good time for parents to speak their minds if the kids don’t ask.

“Lean into it, step up to the plate,” Tolle says. “On Thanksgiving after dinner, tell your children what you want. You really will lift a burden.”

An earlier version of this story ran on Nov. 28, 2013.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Download

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Flip through a popular children’s furniture catalog and you’ll find baby cribs with bumpers — a padded piece of fabric that ties around the wooden slats, making the crib look cozy and cute. The problem, researchers say, is these bumpers can be deadly, because babies can get caught in the fabric and suffocate.

“They are dangerous; don’t use them,” says Dr. Bradley Thach, a professor emeritus of pediatrics at the Washington University School of Medicine. Thach was the author of a landmark study in 2007 that first documented crib bumper deaths. He says things have gotten worse since then.

Thach is one of the authors of a study, published Wednesday in The Journal of Pediatrics, that shows the number of deaths attributed to crib bumpers has increased significantly in recent years.

Using data reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an independent federal regulatory agency that oversees consumer products, the study found that 23 babies died over a seven-year span between 2006 and 2012 from suffocation attributed to a crib bumper. That’s three times higher than the average number of deaths in the three previous seven-year time spans. In total 48 babies’ deaths were attributed to crib bumpers between 1985 and 2012. An additional 146 infants sustained injuries from the bumpers, including choking on the bumper ties or nearly suffocating.

“These deaths are entirely preventable,” says N.J. Scheers, the study’s lead author and former manager of the CPSC’s infant suffocation project. Babies either got their face caught in the bumper and couldn’t breathe or they got wedged between the bumper and something else in the crib. In all of these instances, Scheers says, “If there were no bumper, the baby would not have died.”

Bumpers were originally intended to stop babies from falling out of the crib; regulations now require the wooden slats to be narrower. Bumpers were also designed to prevent babies from bumping their heads or getting their arms and legs caught in the rails. But Scheers says a sleeping sack is a safer way to keep arms and legs safe, and a little bump on the head is not worth the risk of suffocation.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American SIDS Institute have both issued warnings about crib bumpers; they advise parents not to use them. But Scheers says when parents go to buy a crib, they see them decorated with bumpers and say, “if they are dangerous, why would the stores be selling them?”

In 2012, a voluntary industry standard was revised to decrease the thickness of the bumpers to 2 inches or less, with the hope that thinner bumpers would be less likely to cause suffocation. But this most recent study found that three deaths occurred with the thinner bumpers.

In 2011, Chicago became the first city in the country to ban the sale of crib bumpers. And in 2013, Maryland also banned the sale of crib bumpers with two exceptions: mesh or breathable bumpers made of thin fabric that allow air to pass through, and vertical bumpers that wrap around each individual crib rail. Scheers wants a similar ban nationwide, with the caution that mesh and vertical bumpers still need to be studied because there’s no data available to prove they are safe.

The CPSC is currently in the process of putting forward a recommendation on how crib bumpers should be regulated. In the meantime, it recommends that “Bare is Best” — the safest way for a baby to sleep is in a crib with nothing but a tightly fitted sheet.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Every year before influenza itself arrives to circulate, misinformation and misconceptions about the flu vaccine begin circulating. Some of these contain a grain of truth but end up distorted, like a whispered secret in the Telephone game.

But if you’re looking for an excuse not to get the flu vaccine, last year’s numbers of its effectiveness would seem a convincing argument on their own. By all measures, last season’s flu vaccine flopped, clocking in at about 23 percent effectiveness in preventing lab-confirmed influenza infections.

But that’s not the whole story, said Lisa Grohskopf, a medical officer in the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Twenty-three is better than zero, but the 23 percent was overall. If you were one of the people who got an influenza B strain, it was closer to 60 percent,” she said. “Even if it’s not going to work against one virus very well, there are other viruses circulating.”

Each year’s flu vaccine contains three (trivalent) or four (quadrivalent) strains of the flu, selected in February by the World Health Organization and then endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration, as the ones experts expect will circulate in the coming flu season. They choose one H1N1 strain, one H3N2 strain and one B virus strain, either from the Yamagata lineage or the Victoria lineage. Quadrivalent vaccines contain a B strain from each lineage.

“Viruses in the Yamagata lineage or in the Victoria lineage are different enough that there’s not a lot of cross-protection,” Grohskopf said. “So if, say, we have a vaccine that contains a Yamagata family virus one season and it ends up being a predominantly Victoria season, we might not get very good protection against B strains.”

But sometimes the experts’ predictions are off the mark, and sometimes a strain they select mutates before the season arrives. Last year, the H3N2 strain they chose was a poor match, and that strain dominated the season, though B viruses became more common toward the end, Grohskopf said. Adjustments were made in the vaccine for the H3N2 virus this year.

“There’s definitely reason to be hopeful that it’s going to be better this year, but it’s a little too early to tell,” Grohskopf said. “Flu seasons can be very variable in terms of how fast they take off, but right now activity is still fairly light.”

The flu vaccine options this year haven’t changed much from last year, with two exceptions. The recombinant flu vaccine, made without the virus and without eggs, is now approved for all adults age 18 and older (instead of just those ages 18 to 49). And the intradermal vaccine, a low-dose vaccine that uses a shorter needle and injects only into the skin, is now available as a quadrivalent vaccine instead of just trivalent.

The CDC does not recommend any one vaccine over another. “We really just think it’s important that people get vaccinated, and depending on where you are, you may not be able to get a particular product,” Grohskopf said. “We don’t want to hunt for one thing and then not get vaccinated until it’s too late and flu is already peaking for the season.”

Getting vaccinated against flu is particularly important for several at-risk groups and people in frequent, close contact with those at-risk groups, Grohskopf said. The populations at the highest risk of serious complications from the flu include pregnant women, people age 50 and older and children under age 5, particularly under age 2, she said.

Anyone with a chronic medical condition, such as lung disease, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease or a neurological condition also has a higher risk of serious complications with an influenza infection. Those at risk of infecting more vulnerable people include parents of young children, day care workers, teachers, caretakers of elderly individuals and anyone working in health care.

But the problem with limiting flu immunization to these groups, she said, is that the flu is a tricky bug — and unpredictable.

“While some people are definitely at higher risk for severe disease if they get the flu, sometimes even generally healthy, young people — older children, younger adults who are the most hardy folks if they don’t have any other chronic illnesses — can get really sick, hospitalized and even die, and we can’t really predict who those folks are going to be,” Grohskopf said. “The majority of people who get the flu are going to feel really crummy for a time and then recover without any problems.” But even those folks lose work time and risk spreading the disease to family members and others, she said.

Another monkey wrench this year is additional evidence, reported at Stat, that getting a flu shot every year might reduce its effectiveness in warding off the flu. This evidence isn’t entirely new, and scientists still don’t entirely understand it, but it also doesn’t mean that skipping the flu shot this year is wise if you got it last year.

In the meantime, for those who still haven’t gotten the vaccine this year, make sure it’s not because of one of the concerns below. As described in the links, each of these misconceptions is based on inaccurate information, a misunderstanding or an exaggeration.

Concern No. 1: Can getting the flu vaccine give you the flu or make you sick?

Fact: The flu shot can’t give you the flu

Concern No. 2: Do I really need to get the flu vaccine this year if I got it last year?

Fact: For now, a new flu shot each year is still recommended

Concern No. 3: Could getting the flu vaccine make it easier for me to catch viruses, pneumonia or other infectious diseases?

Fact: Flu vaccines reduce the risk of pneumonia and other illnesses

Concern No. 4: Isn’t the flu shot just a “one size fits all” approach that doesn’t make sense for everyone?

Fact: You have many flu vaccine options, including egg-free, virus-free, preservative-free, low-dose, high-dose and no-needle choices

Concern No. 5: Can the flu shot cause death?

Fact: There have been no confirmed deaths from the flu shot

Concern No. 6: Aren’t deaths from the flu exaggerated?

Fact: Deaths from influenza range from the lower thousands to tens of thousands each U.S. flu season

Concern No. 7: Aren’t the side effects of the flu shot worse than the flu?

Fact: Influenza is nearly always far worse than flu vaccine side effects

Concern No. 8: Don’t flu vaccines contain dangerous ingredients such as mercury, formaldehyde and antifreeze?

Fact: Flu shot ingredients do not pose a risk to most people

Concern No. 9: Shouldn’t pregnant women avoid the flu shot or only get the preservative-free shot? Could the flu vaccine cause miscarriages?

Fact: Pregnant women are a high-risk group particularly recommended to get the flu shot. Fact: The flu shot reduces miscarriage risk. Fact: Pregnant women can get any inactivated flu vaccine

Concern No. 10: Can flu vaccines cause Alzheimer’s disease?

Fact: There is no link between Alzheimer’s disease and the flu vaccine; flu vaccines protect older adults

Concern No. 11: Don’t pharmaceutical companies make a massive profit on flu vaccines?

Fact: Vaccines make up a tiny proportion of pharma profits. That makes it possible for them to continue making them in the event of a pandemic

Concern No. 12: Flu vaccines don’t really work, do they?

Fact: Flu vaccines reduce the risk of flu

Concern No. 13: But flu shots don’t work in children, do they?

Fact: Flu vaccines reduce children’s risk of flu

Concern No. 14: Can flu vaccines cause vascular or cardiovascular disorders?

Fact: Flu shots reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke

Concern No. 15: Can vaccines can break through the blood-brain barrier of young children and hinder their development?

Fact: Flu vaccines have been found safe for children 6 months and older

Concern No. 16: Will the flu vaccine cause narcolepsy?

Fact: The U.S. seasonal flu vaccine does not cause narcolepsy.

Concern No. 17: Can the flu vaccine weaken your body’s immune response?

Fact: The flu vaccine prepares your immune system to fight influenza.

Concern No. 18: Can’t the flu vaccine cause nerve disorders such as Guillain-Barré syndrome?

Fact: Influenza is more likely than the flu shot to cause Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Concern No. 19: Can the flu vaccine make you walk backward or cause other neurological disorders like Bell’s palsy?

Fact: Neurological side effects linked to flu vaccination are extremely rare (see Concern No. 18), but influenza can cause neurological complications. Fact: The flu shot has not been shown to cause Bell’s palsy.

Concern No. 20: Don’t people recover quickly from flu since it’s not really that bad?

Fact: Influenza knocks most people down *hard*

Concern No. 21: Can people die from the flu even if they don’t have another underlying condition?

Fact: Otherwise healthy people DO die from the flu

Concern No. 22: Can people with egg allergies get the flu shot?

Fact: People with egg allergies can get a flu shot

Concern No. 23: Can’t I just take antibiotics if I get the flu?

Fact: Antibiotics can’t treat a viral infection

Concern No. 24: Since I got the flu last time I got a flu shot, that means it doesn’t really work for me personally, right?

Fact: The flu shot cannot guarantee you won’t get the flu, but it reduces the risk of catching it

Concern No. 25: But I don’t need the shot since I never get the flu, right?

Fact: You can’t predict whether you’ll get the flu

Concern No. 26: Can’t I protect myself from the flu by simply eating right and washing my hands regularly?

Fact: A good diet and good hygiene alone cannot prevent the flu

Concern No. 27: Won’t getting the flu simply make my immune system stronger?

Fact: The flu weakens your immune system while your body is fighting it and puts others at risk

Concern No. 28: If I get the flu, why won’t just staying home prevent me from infecting others?

Fact: You can transmit the flu without showing symptoms

Concern No. 29: Can having a new vaccine each year make influenza strains stronger?

Fact: There’s no evidence flu vaccines have a major effect on virus mutations

Concern No. 30: Isn’t the “stomach flu” the same thing as the flu?
Fact: The “stomach flu” is a generic term for gastrointestinal illnesses unrelated to influenza

Concern No. 31: Is there any point in getting a flu shot if I haven’t gotten one by now?

Fact: Getting the flu shot at any time during flu season will reduce your risk of getting the flu

Tara Haelle is a freelance health and science writer based in Peoria, Ill. She’s on Twitter: @tarahaelle

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

Download

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.