Will you vaccinate against swine flu?
The amazing ability of swine flu to spread like wildfire hit home for me this summer, when my kids' sleepaway camp was canceled due to an outbreak among the counselors just before camp started.
So I am reading with interest about the federal government's preparations for more potential outbreaks when school starts next month.
Children ages 5 to 17 will be among the first to be offered a new vaccine, scheduled to be available in October. It will be interesting to see if schools start to require the new shot and refuse to allow kids who aren't inoculated.
I hope not. From what I've read, if you're healthy, swine flu will knock you out for a few days but
then you get better, just like any flu. So I would hesitate to vaccinate my kids with a quickly developed, largely untested vaccine against an illness from which they likely would recover quickly with no long-term effects.
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