Influenza Vaccination Guidelines: Ideal Window To Get Your Flu Shot Children And Adults
The foremost preventive modalities for some of the most viral respiratory illnesses are the same. Very Basic hand hygiene and cough etiquettes help avoid several diseases. Other often overlooked modalities are keeping common areas well ventilated and practicing healthy habits such as: Getting enough sleep, being active, managing stress, drinking loads of fluids, and eating nutritious food. It is also important to note that influenza or other viral illnesses only require symptomatic treatment for fever, cold, and cough. Antibiotics are ineffective against viruses and indiscriminate antibiotic use is known to cause havoc with antibiotic resistance. TheHealthSite.com spoke to Dr. Trupti Gilada, Consultant Physician in Infectious Disease, Masina Hospital to understand more about the preventive measure to combat the cold and flu and guidelines that one should follow before getting an influenza shot.
There is non-stop influenza activity across the country, with seasonal peaks during monsoon and winter. There is an ever-increasing number of influenza-like illnesses affecting a large number of children who transmit the disease to their peers and adult counterparts very easily.
In resource-rich nations, the influenza vaccine is administered to every individual annually. While it may not be practical to administer routine influenza vaccinations to everyone in India, the vaccination for high-risk groups such as the elderly, children below 5 years, medical practitioners, and pregnant women should be considered on priority.
Even the Indian Association of Pediatrics recommends that given the influenza activity round the year with seasonal peaks, high morbidity and mortality in high-risk groups, including children below 5 years, paucity of facilities for laboratory diagnosis, high transmission rate, substantial socioeconomic burden, it would be justified to use Influenza vaccine routinely in the high-risk group of children below the age of 5 years.
Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases among children. One of the common triggers for asthma is viral infections like influenza and such episodes sometimes need hospitalisation. A Scottish study found that children aged 5 17 years with poorly controlled asthma are at pointed (3 6 times higher) risk to be infected by Covid-19 compared to those without asthma. Vaccines that prevent such viral diseases have been found to be both safe and effective in decreasing their risk of hospitalization, the number of missed days of school and ultimately could reduce the spread of disease.
Studies have shown that inoculating an influenza vaccine at the exact same time as the covid-19 vaccine presented no safety concerns and preserves the immune response to both vaccines. The advantage of getting them together is if you do get side effects, you'll only get them once. Getting both vaccines around the same time but not on the same day is fine too.
The impact of vaccination on an individual's health is hard to exaggerate. It is estimated that vaccines prevent approximately 6 million deaths from preventable diseases annually. The only health benefit perceived by most vaccine recipients is their direct protection at an individual level. The added value of vaccination, on a population level, is the potential to generate herd immunity. When a sufficiently good proportion of the population is vaccinated, the transmission of the disease is halted thus also protecting the unvaccinated, who may be too young, too vulnerable, or too immunosuppressed to receive vaccines themselves.
