Never Fear

It’s been all over the news lately: stories about H1N1 influenza. Whether it’s criticism of the government’s poor roll-out of H1N1 vaccination programs to tragic stories of young lives lost, everyone, it seems, is very afraid of this bug.

And while I’m no doctor, I am a mother with a lot of experience dealing with fears, real or imagined. I know that one of the best ways to allay fears is to confront them face-on, and to concentrate on the facts.

So here are a few facts about the 2009 H1N1 flu that I garnered from Health Canada’s Key Facts on H1N1 page:

1. The H1N1 virus is spread through contact with an infected person who sneezes or coughs.
2. The virus may live for a short time on surfaces touched by an infected person.
3. Infected persons are contagious from about 1 day before symptoms emerge until about the 7th day after symptoms emerge.
4. It is affecting more young and healthy people than the regular seasonal flu, which normally affects seniors and young children. However, only 101 people have died in Canada as a result of H1N1 flu. That’s 101 out of over 33,000,000, or 0.0003%.

There’s one more fact we need to face here, and that is that while one of the best ways to protect yourself from infection with the H1N1 virus is vaccination, there is a shortage of flu vaccines in Canada at the present time. This means you may have some difficulty getting an H1N1 shot (if that is your choice) for at least a few more weeks. Knowing that, we can take a look at our flu facts, and see that a fairly straightforward pattern emerges: you can do a pretty darn good job of protecting yourself against this virus by:

1. Washing your hands well and often with soap and water. If no soap is available, use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Teach your children to sneeze into their sleeve or into a tissue.
2. Regularly disinfect high-touch areas at home and work: telephones, countertops, computer keyboards, etc. 
3. If a colleague shows up for work coughing and sneezing, politely ask
   them to go home and stay home until 24 hours after their symptoms have
   cleared. Same goes for keeping sick children home from school.
4. Keep it all in perspective, and remember that fear sells. The media loves a good scary story, and nothing gets our hearts fluttering quite like the prospect of a pandemic. All in all, the odds that you or your loved ones will contract this virus at all are very low.

So there you go, honey. Look at the facts. Doesn’t it seem a little less frightening now?