National Public Radio's health editors, Joe Neel and Anne Gudenkauf, team up with two doctors who are infectious disease experts to answer a litany of listener questions about the flu. Here are some excerpts:
Regarding the effectiveness of flu vaccines, they say:
“Influenza vaccines vary in their effectiveness, but overall they do their job quite well. Among young, healthy people, flu vaccines are 80 percent or more effective in preventing the strains of the disease contained in the vaccine.”
With the season flu, experts make their best guess about which strain will be dominant in the coming year. This year's H1N1 vaccine, on the other hand, “is not only on target, but it's a bull's eye right in middle – this is a maximally effective influenza vaccine," says Vanderbilt University's Dr. William Schaffner, because the H1N1 flu virus has remained incredibly genetically stable since last spring.
What about the mercury-containing vaccine preservative thimerosal?
"Thimerosal and vaccine safety has been investigated quite thoroughly, and there have been no associations between getting thimerosal-containing vaccines and any kind of adverse side effects," says Dr. Andrew Pekosz, an expert on viruses and immunology and a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The amount of mercury in a dose of thimerosal-containing influenza vaccine is well below the safety levels for mercury exposure and has been deemed safe by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other experts.
If for personal reasons you still want to seek out a thimerosal-free vaccine, the nasal spray vaccine doesn't contain it, and some of the injectable vaccine is also made without it. But, Schaffner says, it may take longer to track down than the standard swine flu vaccine.
Is the widespread use of hand sanitizer going to create resistant strains of these viruses?
Alcohol-based hand sanitizers work very well against influenza because they dissolve the virus' outer coat, making it non-infectious, Pekosz says. Resistance of influenza to alcohol-based sanitizers is not going to develop like it can in bacteria.
