It seems that a sizable number of people -- 38% in one group of older adults -- still believe the influenza vaccine can give you the flu.
It can't. Doctors are in widespread agreement on this. Influenza virus is made from dead virus, which means it is not capable of launching an infection in your body.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday November 07, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 53 words Type of Material: Correction
Flu shots --An article in Monday's Health section listed categories of people for whom the influenza vaccine is recommended. The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends vaccination for healthy people age 50 to 64 and for anyone who wants to prevent the flu. Those groups were not listed in the article.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday November 10, 2003 Home Edition Health Part F Page 9 Features Desk 1 inches; 69 words Type of Material: Correction
Flu shots -- A story last Monday on the influenza vaccine listed the categories of people for whom the vaccine is recommended. The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommends vaccination for healthy people age 50 to 64 -- and anyone who wants to prevent the flu. These groups were not listed in the story because their risk of complications is not as high as older people.
Nonetheless, physicians and other health-care workers know they'll hear whining this year from patients who fear getting the flu shot they need. Now that the vaccines are recommended for babies, such unfounded worries become even more serious -- they could prevent some of the most vulnerable from getting the protection they need.
The national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends the flu shot for people 65 and older; children 6 months to 23 months old; anyone with a chronic health condition; health-care workers; anyone near a child under the age of 2; and women more than three months' pregnant. The agency also urges all other healthy Americans to consider getting the vaccine.
"There is a prevailing myth that the vaccine causes the flu, and it bothers me," says Dr. Richard Kent Zimmerman, an associate professor of family medicine and clinical epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. "It particularly bothers me because, in the 1990s, there were 36,000 deaths annually in the United States from flu. We were fortunate we've had a couple of milder years since then, but we may not have a mild year this year."
Zimmerman is the author of the study of 1,383 people, age 66 and older, which found that 38% of unvaccinated people feared that they would get the flu from the vaccine. Among the vaccinated people in the study, published in January in the American Journal of Medicine, only 6% believed the myth.
According to the CDC, the flu shot can cause only mild symptoms such as soreness in the arm, a low-grade fever and body aches.
"You would not get a cough, runny nose, congestion or sore throat," says Jeffrey A. Goad, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at the USC School of Pharmacy. If you develop more severe symptoms, you probably contracted a virus about the time you received the flu shot, Goad says.
Because the elderly are more likely than other age groups to develop a low fever from the flu vaccine, they often are more reluctant to get the shot, says Stella Henry, a nurse and founder of the Vista del Sol Care Center in Culver City. Officials at the skilled nursing and assisted living center have promoted flu vaccination in recent years, because flu deaths most often occur in the elderly.
