Word: h1n1
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...swipe their ID cards and even attached to paychecks. The notices are there to remind the hospital's staff - which includes everyone from the doctors and nurses who care for patients to the administrative, housekeeping and food-service personnel - that every employee must be vaccinated against both seasonal and H1N1 flu or face possible termination...
...mandate comes from the health department of New York, which over the summer became the first state to require that all health-care workers be vaccinated against influenza. In other states, individual hospitals have taken the same aggressive position. Given that the pandemic H1N1 strain is circulating the globe - and that one of the seasonal-flu strains is resistant to Tamiflu, a commonly used antiviral treatment - such a policy seems logical. But is it legal? Flu-vaccine requirements are being challenged by health-care workers who maintain that decisions about vaccination should be theirs and theirs alone. In the state...
Health-care workers are especially vulnerable to both getting sick with influenza and spreading it to patients. That's why the U.S. government has singled out these workers, along with other high-risk groups, to receive the first batches of 2009 H1N1 vaccine, which are just starting to arrive in some states. Vaccination can reduce the risk of getting influenza 70% to 80% and is the most effective way to curb the pandemic. "It is within the purview of health authorities that we engage in certain infection-control activities," says Susan Waltman, general counsel of the Greater New York Hospital...
Employers, notes Alabama labor-and-employment attorney Jennifer Swain of the firm Baker Donelson, can set conditions of employment. So does that mean any company could impose an H1N1-vaccine requirement as part of its business-continuity plan? Most likely yes, but Swain is betting that few non-health-care companies would be willing to endure the inevitable protests against such a policy. "In health care, it strengthens an employer's argument that an employee might cause a direct threat by not being vaccinated," she says. (See pictures of thermal scanners hunting for swine...
...colored clip to attach to their hospital ID. The idea is to make easily identifiable those who are unvaccinated and therefore need to wear masks when caring for patients with respiratory illnesses. The hospital intended to have two colored clips this year: one for seasonal flu and one for H1N1. But administrators realized that since the H1N1 vaccine is prioritized for specific groups, such as pregnant women and people with a weakened immune system, the clips would - at least initially - single out people with those conditions. (See how not to get the H1N1...