Link: Health | canada.com.
As anyone with kids in preschool or school knows, children are the primary vectors for whatever exotic bug is going around. A recent study seems to show that... (no, really?)
Preschoolers may signal the arrival of flu season. Thirty days after hacking three- and four-year-olds start showing up in doctors' offices and emergency rooms, flu-ridden adults follow.
Since most flu-related deaths are in the elderly, that's where the vacinnation programs have focused. Since we keep many of our elderly conveniently housed where we can't see them, but where flu can quickly spread through a whole institution, it makes sense to continue to put lots of vaccine resources there. Maybe we can add some kid-intervention too.
As any parent knows, the best place for your kid (and eventually, you) to pick up some really nasty infection in the a pediatrician's waiting room. The next best place (for me at least) seems to be standing in a crowded, overheated, Metro train with somebody sneezing on the back of my neck.
All this, of course, with an eye toward the apparently universally-accepted notion that the avian flu pandemic is imminent.
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