Government to Intensely Track for H1N1 Shot Side Effects

This is tooo much. I just did my Radio Show tonight, "Ask this Nurse", on BogTalkRadio about this very subject. And I talked about side effects of the Vaccine. Too Cool. So read on "MacBeth".

From Fox News:

WASHINGTON — More than 3,000 people a day have a heart attack. If you're one of them the day after your H1N1 flu shot, will you worry the vaccine was to blame and not the more likely culprit, all those burgers and fries?

The government is starting an unprecedented system to track possible side effects as mass flu vaccinations begin next month. The idea is to detect any rare but real problems quickly, and explain the inevitable coincidences that are sure to cause some false alarms.

"Every day, bad things happen to people. When you vaccinate a lot of people in a short period of time, some of those things are going to happen to some people by chance alone," said Dr. Daniel Salmon, a vaccine safety specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Health authorities hope to vaccinate well over half the population in just a few months against swine flu, which doctors call the 2009 H1N1 strain. That would be a feat. No more than 100 million Americans usually get vaccinated against regular winter flu, and never in such a short period.

How many will race for the vaccine depends partly on confidence in its safety. The last mass inoculations against a different swine flu, in 1976, were marred by reports of a rare paralyzing condition, Guillain-Barre syndrome.

I don't want this to be a "fear mongering blogger site", but you have got to get the facts. Knowledge is the weapon of choice in this fight, and many other fights we have ahead of us.

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