To Do No Harm

The debate here is among health professionals. To be immunized or not? While the Province of Ontario has fully funded annual flu immunization shots for the entire population, fewer than 50% of health professionals have been agreeable to taking those shots. Rather more than that among the general population take advantage of the opportunity to be immunized. And the campaign appears to work reasonably well.

Now, with the advent of another type of flu, one which promises to produce a truly potential international health calamity as a pandemic, the recognized urgency for society to be prepared to experience the misfortune of H1N1 contraction is paramount. With the onset of fall and winter, the promise of a return of the initial, somewhat lackadaisical appearance of the H1N1 virus which caused minimal discomfort in most people infected may return to wreak true havoc.

It may, or it may not have mutated to become a more health-abusive virus. Pregnant women, children and young adults have been seen to be more susceptible to the H1N1 virus than older people whom, it is thought, may have some immunity as a result of previous exposure in an earlier, similar viral flu outbreak. Those born before the 1950s are held to be less at risk.

This highly transmissible virus is causing government and the health community no little amount of headaches. Anticipating its arrival, and anticipating as well, the full swoop of its potential. To assail some with minimal results, and to affect many immune-compromised individuals to a far greater degree. No one can imagine whether this may result in many severely ill people with long periods of rehabilitation before them, and even deaths.

The health-care community, the first-responders, those who provide health care in public institutions and private health care facilities are deemed to be responsible enough to ensure they take the required immunization shots so they will not act as vectors, passing the virus on to those whom they care for. Yet this simple-appearing direction appears to have hit against a stone wall of resistance.

Fully half of health-care workers, from doctors, to nurses, pharmacists, to hospital technicians, ambulance drivers and paramedics are stridently resistant to the need to be immunized to ensure that precautions have been taken, that they are less likely to become themselves infected and to communicate that infection to the many people with whom they come in contact through the course of their duties.

There are no guarantees that the immunizing agents are completely without complications for some people, that there may be health repercussions as a result of having taken the required immune shots. It is entirely possible that some minuscule segment of society will be adversely affected, and some even smaller number critically affected. There are risks in all manner of enterprises.

We are assured by our health professionals, those whom we depend upon to protect us during these times to the best of their abilities, that the scientific community sees immunization on a mass scale as the best preventive for global disaster. Those in the health community who are tasked with looking after the health of individuals in a hospital setting should be prepared to submit to the same treatment required of the general population.

Their participation, in fact, is far more critical. It is the profession they sought, the practise they felt compelled toward, and they should be prepared to honour its most basic precept.