# 3815
With H1N1 vaccine beginning to roll out in the US this week, expected to ship next week in the UK, and already going into the arms of Australians and Chinese, Canadian officials are in the unenviable position of explaining why a vaccine won’t become available there until November at the earliest.
In recent weeks Canadian Health officials have come increasingly under fire - adjusting their seasonal vaccination plans in light of a controversial unpublished study linking it to increased H1N1 infection -and managing a public relations gaff after sending a large number of body bags to a remote First Nations reserve in Manitoba.
The November timetable for the vaccine has recently become fodder for news stories and editorials.
According to Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. David-Butler Jones, the Swine Flu virus isn’t circulating as widely in Canada this fall as it is in the United States, which he believes gives them more time to act.
Meanwhile, Federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq is extolling the virtues of hand washing, insisting that 80% of common infections, including influenza, can be spread by contaminated hands.
This runs contrary to a recent study reported in the CMAJ (see Sanitized For Your Protection) that argued that their was `no evidence’ that frequent hand washing would prevent the spread of influenza – a report whose significance Minister Aglukkaq is downplaying.
This report from Sharon Kirkey, of the Canwest News Service.
Canada trailing U.S. in rollout of H1N1 vaccine
By Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News Service
October 8, 2009 9:56 AM
As health officials in the U.S. prepare to release tens of millions of doses of human swine-flu vaccine, Canadian health officials are teaching Canadians how to wash their hands.
The contrast is raising renewed questions about whether the vaccine will be made available in time to protect Canadians from a second wave of the pandemic.
Canada's chief public health officer said Wednesday that 35 per cent or more of the country could become sick with H1N1. But the largest vaccination program in the nation's history is not scheduled to begin before the first week of November, when the first doses of vaccine will go to those at highest risk of serious illness, including adults under 65 with chronic health conditions and health-care workers involved in pandemic response.
The advice being offered on flu hygiene by Canadian officials isn’t much different from what our own CDC/HHS has been suggesting for months.
While hand washing may be of limited value in controlling influenza, it is proactive, reasonably easy to do, and undoubtedly lessens the transmission of some germs and viruses.
It is certainly a habit worth encouraging.
The problem is, that in the absence of having anything else to offer, public health officials tend to `oversell’ it as a flu preventative. This is a problem I wrote about several weeks ago in The Flaw In The Ointment.
I am sympathetic to the plight of public health officials, however.
They have to say something. They need to give the public something they can reasonably do, that empowers them and makes them feel at least somewhat in control of their fate during a pandemic.
Hand washing may not be a panacea, but until you can get a vaccine, it undoubtedly beats doing nothing.
Which reminds me . . . where’s my hand sanitizer?
