It may not be perfect, but the influenza vaccine has saved many people's lives

摘要

HALTING an influenza pandemic before the introduction of flu vaccine was an impossible task. Some 20-50 million people worldwide are thought to have died in the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918-19, nearly 200,000 of them in England. Nearly a century later, the global death toll for the 2009-10 pandemic has been put at 150,000-575,000, with fewer than 500 deaths in the UK. Although better healthcare and antiviral medicines saved many lives in the recent pandemic, vaccination has helped reduce the spread of both seasonal and pandemic flu in the UK for over 50 years. Jonathan Nguyen-Van-Tarn, Professor of Health Protection at the University of Nottingham, highlights the introduction of flu vaccination targets in the elderly in the 1990s as an important turning point in the UK.