Opinion

NY hospital flu horror

The significant and early flu epidemic prompted Gov. Cuomo to declare a public-health emergency this week. His goal was to get more people, especially the young, easier access to flu vaccination. Too bad he can’t require hospital workers to get vaccinated.

Too many nurses and other workers who care for sick patients are declining the vaccine — a choice likely to prove fatal to some patients.

Hospitals are going out of their way to make vaccine available. The program in a hospital where I work will vaccinate anyone who wishes, at their greatest convenience, for no cost. But many workers just don’t want to get vaccinated.

In a Jan. 13 letter to his staff, Dr. Steven Safyer, the Montefiore Medical Center president and CEO, noted that “fewer than 50 percent of our associates have been vaccinated. This means the majority of our associates are at risk for illness.”

He adds, “For yourselves, your family and your patients, I encourage you to get the safe and effective flu vaccine.”

Against this, there’s this troublesome statement from the New York Nurses Association: “The New York State Nurses Association supports immunization as an effective way to reduce the risk of contracting the flu, but we also support the rights of registered professional nurses to choose whether or not they wish to be vaccinated.”

Too many workers are making the wrong choice, at risk to themselves and their patients.

I’ve asked around; some refuse outright, while others falsely claim an allergy to eggs to avoid confrontation. (All flu vaccines are incubated in eggs, but the risk of a severe allergic reaction to people with a known egg allergy is very small.)

Many who refused the vaccine told me that they didn’t take it because they’re healthy and past flu shots have left them feeling as if they got a minor case of the flu.

It’s depressing to hear this from people who work in health care. In fact, the viruses in the flu shot are killed (inactivated), so it can’t give you the flu — and the risk of any serious reaction is extremely small.

Yes, some people complain of some soreness at the site and some may have a day or two of muscle aches or a low-grade fever — but you simply can’t get the flu from a flu shot.

According to the infectious-disease doctors I’ve spoken with, many New Yorkhospitals have tried to make flu vaccination mandatory but have been beaten back by union lawyers. So they can’t force even workers on an oncology floor, who care for immuno-suppressed patients on chemotherapy, to get the shot.

Too many hospital employees are now going to work thinking that they may be coming down with a cold when they actually have early stages of the flu. They work in close contact with immuno-suppressed patients, the elderly, cancer patients and others just recovering from major operations, and they’re unknowingly infecting them with the flu. Hundreds of patients will likely be infected in this way and some number killed.

And there’s nothing we can do about it.

Dr. Evan S. Levine is the author of “What Your Doctor Won’t (or Can’t) Tell You.”