Kids and teens should be the new priority for flu shots suggests a McMaster study that could significantly affect public policy worldwide.

Vaccinating school kids protects the rest of the community from flu as much, if not more, as the shot itself concludes the research being published in the Journal of the American Medical Association tomorrow.

It flies in the face of long-standing thinking that the elderly and chronically-ill should be the priority for vaccination because they make up most of the 20,000 hospitalizations and estimated 2,000 to 8,000 seasonal flu deaths in Canada each year.

“The world has it all wrong,” said Dr. Michael Gardam director of infectious disease prevention and control for the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion.

He says policy-makers need to “take a hard look” at the “important” research led by Hamilton infectious disease expert Dr. Mark Loeb.

“What it is suggesting is that for the next flu season we should really be putting a lot of emphasis to getting flu shots to kids,” said Gardam. “That’s something that we’re actually pretty bad at getting kids vaccinated against the flu. We were very good at getting the elderly vaccinated.”

 The study is the first hard evidence to prove that vaccinating kids is the key to stopping flu from spreading. Loeb and his team found that giving the shot to students aged three to 15 reduced influenza by about 60 per cent in people who didn't get vaccinated in the community - the same protection they'd have from getting the shot themselves. In fact, it's likely more effective if you also vaccinate toddlers under three.

"We might have underestimated the effect," said Loeb." If we looked at individuals who are younger and we?d immunized them as well we might even have had a higher protective effectiveness."

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