Bird Flu, cat flu, dog flu, flu you!

I am sick and tired of hearing about the bird flu. Once again the media is attempting to scare us all with their constant reporting of the “worst case scenario” situations. While I do believe it is important to protect individuals from known diseases and teach society how to prevent the spread of infections through basic principals such as hand washing and more active preventions such as vaccinations, scaring people to death is not the way to approach it.

I have the opportunity to work with our county health nurse on occasion and she told me of the very long lines of people lined up for the flu shot this year. If you can remember back to last year at this time the media was bombarding us with terrible news of the lack of flu vaccines. We were going to have the worse flu season ever, with more deaths etc. (We didn’t) She had many people tell her they were getting the flu shot this year, just in case of the bird flu. While her attempts to explain to people that the flu vaccine would not protect them from this, they insisted that it could help and that they wanted it. I do not know when the public became more informed of the steps in protection of the Avian Flu then the county health nurse did, but there were many of them that felt they were.

I hope as a nurse I can take the time to educate myself about this situation, so that in some small way I will be able to ease a friend or neighbors fear that the media has planted. The CDC website is a good place to start. It is the first source I have seen that does not fill the pages with scare tactics to get you to pay attention, and want to keep coming back to so you can learn more of the deadly news, like the major media outlets.

So my link for the day is, you guessed it, The Centers For Disease Control!