Dutch scientists: Skip seasonal flu shot for kids

LONDON (AP) — Dutch scientists made a controversial suggestion Friday that children might be better off skipping the seasonal-flu vaccine this year — a proposal flatly rejected by other health experts.

Their commentary, based largely on animal studies, was published online today in the British medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases. Yet many top health officials said there was no proof that children are more likely to avoid H1N1 flu by passing on a seasonal flu shot.

“The best shot parents have at protecting their kids is to get them a shot in the arm or up the nose,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “Parents should get whatever vaccine is available and approved.”

In the opinion piece, Guus Rimmelzwaan of Erasmus University and his colleagues suggested that health authorities reevaluate the recommendation by countries like the U.S. and Canada to give all healthy children between 6 months and 5 years old a flu shot. The World Health Organization recommends that healthy children under 2 get a flu shot.

The theory is that children infected with seasonal flu acquire a certain kind of immunity that might protect them against new flu outbreaks such as swine flu or bird flu.

In the 1957 Asian flu pandemic, the Dutch scientists noted that people infected with seasonal flu were less likely to catch the pandemic virus. They also cited data showing the same trend in mice and ferrets, the latter of which are believed to be a good model for flu in humans.

Other health experts said it would be dangerous to revise flu policies now for results based mainly on animal experiments.

“This is an interesting theory, but it does not reflect what we see in human populations,” said Ville Peltola of Turku University Hospital in Finland, who co-authored an accompanying reaction piece in the same medical journal.