Free Flu Shots Available Oct 9th
The Floyd County Health Department will offer free flu shots to the public at a special flu-shot clinic being conducted as a countywide emergency-preparedness exercise on Thursday, October 9 from 8 AM to 11 AM at the health department in Rome.
According to health department Nurse Manager Pat Townley. “If you are four years of age or older, come get a flu shot,” Townley said, while noting that “clients under the age of 18 must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian.”
Townley asks that people getting the flu shots wear short sleeves or jackets and sweaters that can be easily removed or rolled up. Townley said that each family getting a flu shot will receive a free digital thermometer, while supply lasts, and an emergency-preparedness package including a “Treating Seasonal or Pandemic Flu at Home” handbook.
Townley stressed that the free flu shots will only be available while their supply lasts and that if the health department’s entire inventory of influenza vaccine for the upcoming flu season is depleted on the day of the free clinic, flu shots will not be available at the health department during the remainder of the 2008-2009 flu season. “While we will have special flu vaccine for young children available at the health department throughout the flu season, and may have some adult vaccine left over, adults and children over four expecting to get their 2008 flu shot from the health department should come to the clinic on October 9,” Townley said.
Townley recommends a yearly flu shot as the best and most important step in protecting against this serious disease. “While not perfect, influenza vaccination is the best way to prevent influenza. Getting a flu vaccination every year is the best way for people to protect themselves and the ones they care about from influenza,” she said. According to Townley, “the time to get an influenza vaccine starts in September and extends into winter ― through February or later ― when the influenza season typically peaks.” Townley points out that “when people, especially school-aged children, receive a flu vaccine, they not only protect themselves, they also protect vulnerable persons around them.”
According to Townley, the free flu-shot clinic will “involve, and, quite frankly, be possible only with the support of all of our community partners, such as emergency management and public safety, with whom we’re always training.” Townley added that Floyd County’s Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) is instrumental in encouraging and conducting the kind of “county-wide, cooperative planning required making this sort of event possible for training purposes or in the event of a real emergency.”
According to Northwest Georgia Public Health Public Information Officer Logan Boss, the free flu shot clinic in Floyd County will be one of ten such clinics conducted throughout northwest Georgia counties in October “to test and practice our emergency-preparedness capability, in particular our ability to distribute and administer large quantities of medicine to the entire population, quickly and efficiently, in case of a Public Health emergency such as pandemic influenza.” According to Boss, funding for the flu shot clinics, including the cost of the influenza vaccine itself, comes from a federal grant intended to strengthen Public Health’s ability to conduct such a massive distribution project as well as to educate the public about pandemic influenza, seasonal influenza and how the two different types of influenza (flu) are inter-related.
“We try to educate the public before every flu season about the importance of getting a flu shot,” Boss said, “because seasonal flu is a serious disease that results in an average of 36,000 deaths and more than 200,000 hospitalizations every year on average.” An influenza pandemic would be much worse. Pandemic flu should not be confused with seasonal flu. Learn the differences.” (Please see the accompanying chart outlining the major differences between seasonal influenza and pandemic influenza.) “Although they’re two different things entirely,” Boss explained, “there is a connection between seasonal influenza and pandemic influenza, and getting a flu shot to protect youfrom seasonal flu helps protect against the likelihood of pandemic influenza.”
“Our great worry about how a pandemic influenza strain can arise is if a human catches seasonal flu and simultaneously catches a bad avian influenza, popularly described as ‘bird flu,’ like H5N1, which is currently circulating in some parts of the world and, experts fear, could very likely be the next strain of pandemic influenza. A genetic transfer, known as re-assortment, can take place so that the ease of person-to-person transmission in the seasonal flu virus transfers to the avian ‘bad guy,’ the H5N1. The avian ‘bad guy’ then becomes easily transmissible person-to-person, and we have the next new virus that causes a flu pandemic. This is an added reason for people to take annual flu shots. If you’re protected against seasonal flu, then you’re less likely to be a host for the seasonal flu virus and a ‘bad guy,’ thus not setting the stage for this re-assortment to occur.”
For information about the Floyd County Health Department’s free flu-shot clinic on October 9, call 706-295-6123.
