Harvard Poll: People Believe H1N1 Is Over

[Shiloh]

Source: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/health/22476255/detail.html

Harvard Poll: People Believe H1N1 Is Over
Majority Of Adults Will Not Vaccinate Themselves

POSTED: 1:17 pm EST February 5, 2010
UPDATED: 2:06 pm EST February 5, 2010

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Only a few months ago, people around the country were concerned about contracting the H1N1 flu and worried about the small supply of vaccine, but those fears have seemed to subside, according to a new study.

A recentHarvard School of Public Health. poll found 44 percent of Americans think that the H1N1 flu outbreak has ended.

Concern about the spread of H1N1 is down from September, when 52 percent of people polled were concerned that they or someone in their immediate family might contract H1N1 in the next year, the study showed.

The poll also showed that parents are more concerned about vaccinating their children than getting the vaccine themselves.

More than half of parents, 53 percent, will have vaccinated their children before the end of the month, the study said. The Center for Disease Control has identified children as a priority group for the vaccine.

A majority of adults, 61 percent, said that they have not gotten the vaccine and do not intend to.

"Many parents heeded the public health message to vaccinate their children against this virus, which hit young people unexpectedly hard," said professor Robert Blendon, Harvard Opinion Research Program director. "But there remains a steady core of adults who, regardless of messaging and other efforts, has chosen not to get the H1N1 vaccine."

A majority, 70 percent of people polled around the country, feel that there are enough doses of the vaccine for everyone in their community who wants it. That number has risen greatly since November, when there was an initial vaccine shortage, and only 21 percent of people believed that there were adequate available doses.

 

[Laidback Al]

Re: Harvard Poll: People Believe H1N1 Is Over

and from the New York Times . . .

February 6, 2010
<nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" "> Most Americans Think Swine Flu Pandemic Is Over, a Harvard Poll Finds </nyt_headline>

<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

</nyt_byline> Most Americans do not intend to get the swine flu vaccine, assume the pandemic is over and think the flu threat was overblown, according to a poll released Friday by the Harvard School of Public Health.

As of the end of January, only about a fifth of all Americans had had swine flu shots, according to that poll and data released separately by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And, even though this flu hit children and teenagers the hardest, only about 40 percent of them have had the shots. That figure could improve because 13 percent of adults surveyed by Harvard told pollsters that they still intended to get their children vaccinated. If they do so, slightly more than half of all the country?s children will have been vaccinated, though many young ones who should have had two shots got only one.

Most parents who did not get shots said they felt the threat had passed. The second-most-common reason was fear of the vaccine, even though monitoring of the first 60 million doses showed no unusual rate of side effects.

?A steady core of adults? has resisted all warnings and appeals from public health officials, said Robert J. Blendon, director of opinion research at Harvard?s School of Public Health, which has done several polls with C.D.C. financing since the outbreak began.

Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said he ?was not surprised? by how few got shots.

?But that could all change overnight if we get a third wave in late February ? and we still could,? he added. ?That would make this half-time data, not end-of-the-game data.?

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the C.D.C.?s director of immunization and respiratory disease, who in early January urged all Americans to get shots because they had finally become plentiful, put a brave face on the low figures, saying she was ?encouraged? because more children got shots than ever previously got regular flu shots and because many got them at school for the first time. If that became routine, it could lead to much wider flu protection because schoolchildren often are the vectors that infect their families.

?I, of course, hope we can do better in future years,? Dr. Schuchat said.
Across the country, flu activity is below normal for this time of year, she said, although hospitalizations and deaths continue. Nine children died of confirmed swine flu in the last week of January, according to weekly data released Friday. The C.D.C. estimates that about 1,000 children have succumbed to it since April.

The new strain continues to ?crowd out? seasonal flu this winter. Only 2 out of 119 samples subtyped were not swine flu, according to the agency?s weekly FluView report.

The data contain one anomaly officials cannot explain: For the third week in a row, the proportion of all death certificates in the country listing pneumonia as the cause of death was well above normal. A week ago, New York City officials noted the same phenomenon, and they are investigating it.

Epidemiologists do not know what caused the pneumonia deaths, which are mostly in elderly patients. Most patients, even in hospitals, are never autopsied. Usually to find the cause of the pneumonia doctors must get a sputum sample to culture in a laboratory, which requires pushing a tube deep into a patient?s lungs. Doctors usually spare patients that ordeal and just keep changing antibiotics, hoping to find one that works. Over half the time, even lung samples grow out nothing that explains why a patient died.
What samples the C.D.C. knows of, Dr. Schuchat said, were routine germs like rhinovirus and respiratory syncytial virus.

The Harvard polling data was of 1,419 adults, including 377 parents, and had a margin of error of three percentage points for the total response. It found that 21 percent of those polled had been vaccinated, and 15 percent intended to by the end of February. Of the parents, 40 percent had had their children vaccinated, and 13 percent intended to.
The centers estimated that 23 percent of all Americans had been vaccinated, and 37 percent of all those under 18 had. It polled 4,110 people and said the margin of error was three percentage points for the estimate of all Americans vaccinated and seven percentage points for the estimate on children.

In Harvard?s poll, 59 percent rated the response by public health officials to the swine flu pandemic ?good? or ?excellent.?

More than three-quarters remembered seeing or hearing some sort of public health announcement urging them to get vaccinated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/health/06flu.html