Young adults who have not had a flu shot are at disproportionate risk of serious illness and hospitalization this flu season, a small new study suggests.
Doctors at Duke University Medical Center looked at 55 patients admitted to the hospital with the flu between November and the first week in January. Of 33 patients admitted to the general ward, 11 had been vaccinated. But in patients requiring intensive care, only two had had the shot, and both of them were immunocompromised, one with leukemia and the other with hepatitis C.
The median age of the patients was 28.5 years, and only six were over 65. Almost half were between 18 and 49. The report appearedonline in The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
Forty-eight of the patients were infected with H1N1, the strain that caused the 2009 epidemic and one known to particularly affect young people.
“With a study of this size, it’s hard to make judgments,” said the lead author, Dr. Cameron R. Wolfe, an assistant professor of medicine at Duke. “This is a small, midpoint-of-the-season assessment. But maybe the vaccine not only reduces the number of infections, but also reduces the chance of getting severely sick.”
via:http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/young-adults-need-flu-shots-too/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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