Ebola Efforts Helped by Flu Shots
Should Ebola continue to crop up in the U.S., having fewer people coming to emergency rooms with the similar symptoms of flu will help the public health system respond. Steve Mirsky reports
By Steve Mirsky
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“There are only 101 reasons why something as simple as a flu shot makes all the sense in the world right now.” David Relman is a Stanford University infectious disease expert. Want to help fight Ebola? Get a flu shot.
“Come this winter, the last thing the public health system needs is a whole bunch—meaning hundreds of thousands—of people who have fever with an ill-defined and undifferentiated illness, who could have prevented those febrile illnesses by simply taking a flu shot. Because should Ebola show up more in this country, every emergency room and clinic is going have to be mindful of what does it mean to see someone with a fever and muscle aches and headache and even diarrhea. It would be a wonderful thing to be able to take influenza off the table and not have to worry about that in the midst of everything else.”
—Steve Mirsky
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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