School Kids, Parents Should Get Flu Vaccines First

Aug. 21 -- THURSDAY, Aug. 20 (HealthDay News) -- The best way to stop the spread of flu, be it the seasonal flu or swine flu, is to vaccinate those most likely to spread the virus, namely school children and their parents, new research suggests.

These recommendations run counter to those of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which call for targeting those most likely to develop complications from flu or die, say scientists at Clemson University and Yale University School of Medicine.

"If there is a moderate amount of vaccine available, the ideal thing to do is vaccinate schoolchildren and people their parent's age," said lead researcher Jan Medlock, an assistant professor in the department of mathematical sciences at Clemson. "This would then indirectly protect the rest of the population.

"Stopping the transmission in schools would then keep the kids from bringing it home to their parents, and keep their parents from giving it to co-workers, grandparents, whatever," he added.

The big difference between these recommendations and those from the CDC is that Medlock does not target children under 5. "Because they are not in school, they are not actively spreading the disease, so vaccines aren't being as well used as they could be used in another age group," he said.

In addition, unlike the CDC's recommendations, Medlock's do not include people over 50. "They can be better protected by stopping the transmission among school kids," he said.

The report is published in the Aug. 20 online edition of Science.

For the study, Medlock and Alison P. Galvani, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale, created a mathematical model of how flu is transmitted that pinpoints the best strategy for distributing vaccines among age groups that would minimize the spread of the virus.

They based their model on data from past flu pandemics, taking into account deaths, infections, total years of life lost and economic costs. By comparing a theoretical outbreak today with the flu epidemics in 1918 and 1957, they argue that a flu epidemic in the United States could be stopped with about 63 million doses of vaccine.