Bloomberg | Less than half of health-care workers in Hong Kong are willing to be vaccinated for swine flu, mainly because of worry over side effects, research published today in the British Medical Journal shows.The proportion of medical workers including nurses and doctors who plan to be immunized against H1N1, the virus that causes swine flu, was 47.9 percent when polled in May, when the World Health Organization’s pandemic alert was at the second- highest level of 5, researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong said. The WHO raised the alert to level 6 in June.
“The prevailing sentiment is that people don’t want to get it,” Thomas Tsang, acting controller of Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection, said on Aug. 23 at a meeting on influenza organized by The Lancet medical journal, China’s health ministry and the WHO. “They are afraid of all sorts of side effects.”
Health-care workers will be among the first inoculated against swine flu in most countries that have announced immunization programs when vaccine producers begin delivery during autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. The WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization recommended last month that countries vaccinate medical personnel first to keep health- care systems operating before determining other priority groups.
H5N1 Study
A separate survey done by the same researchers found that 28.4 percent of respondents said they were willing to be vaccinated for the H5N1 bird flu strain when asked in January to March, when the pandemic alert was at level 3. There were “no significant changes” in the level of willingness to get inoculated against H5N1, which kills three of every five reported cases, after the WHO raised the alert to level 5.
The researchers looked at self-administered, anonymous questionnaires from 2,255 health-care workers at 31 Hong Kong public hospital departments for the two studies.
The surveys show a “consistently low level of willingness” to accept pre-pandemic flu vaccination, the study said. The researchers were surprised that more respondents -- three-quarters of whom were nurses -- didn’t plan to be vaccinated, given the impact of the 2003 SARS outbreak on Hong Kong. Those who weren’t planning to get the shot expressed doubts about its effectiveness among reasons for declining it.
“Vaccination is one of the potentially effective measures that can reduce mortality and morbidity from pandemic influenza,” the authors wrote. “However, the effectiveness of this measure depends heavily on the uptake rate in those groups assigned high priority.”
Infection Rate
H1N1 has infected at least 182,166 people and killed at least 1,799 around the world as of Aug. 13, the WHO said last week. The figures are based on laboratory-confirmed cases reported to the Geneva-based UN agency.
The WHO’s pandemic alert level of 5 signifies human-to- human transmission in at least two countries in one region. The highest phase, 6, indicates sustained community-level outbreaks in at least one country in another WHO region.
Most studies show that less than 60 percent of health-care workers have seasonal flu shots, according to the BMJ report.
An online survey of almost 1,500 readers of Nursing Times, a U.K. trade publication, published last week found that 30 percent didn’t plan to get vaccinated against swine flu and 37 percent did. The remainder was undecided. Liam Donaldson, England’s chief medical officer, said last week that the U.K. wouldn’t require health-care personnel to get inoculated.
