Friday, October 24, 2014

Have you had your flu shot yet?

This is Joseph

I was reading Mike the Mad Biologist's web page and I noted this article on Ebola and the flu.  Ebola has been in the news a lot but influenza remains a bigger killer than Ebola:
Ebola has claimed fewer than 4,000 lives globally to date, none in the United States. Flu claims between 250,000 and 500,000 lives every year, including over 20,000 in the United States—far more American lives than Ebola will ever claim.
Notice just how terrible the Spanish flu was:
It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed 50 to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population
Today, that would be a disease that killed between nine and fifteen million Americans.  And the easiest option to reduce risk is to vaccinate against the infection. 

Have you had your flu vaccine?  [I get mine annually, usually on the first day it is permitted]

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