Flu season is well underway, and doctors are saying that although there hasn’t been a flood of hospitalizations due to flu-related illness, everyone—especially those in high-risk groups, such as COPD patients—should get their H1N1 flu vaccine if they haven’t already.
“At Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, everybody’s been seeing a slowdown in November and December,” says Dr. Jack H. Turco, the Director of the Dartmouth College Health Service in Hanover, NH and a specialist in endocrinology at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. “I think everyone in the U.S. has been seeing a decrease in the amount of outbreak, but some parts of the country are still having a consistent amount of cases.”
Turco says that when students at Dartmouth College went home for winter break on December 10th, the college had administered around 1,000 H1N1 vaccines to high-risk members of the population. The high risk members included medical providers, first responders and people with underlying medical conditions.
“Just before we left [for winter break] we started giving the vaccination to people ages 24 to 65 with underlying medical conditions,” Turco says.
Despite the lack of hospitalizations due to flu-related illnesses, Dartmouth College experienced the loss of one graduate student who died “indirectly” from H1N1. The student was believed to have medical conditions of which were exacerbated upon acquiring H1N1.
Dr. Byron Thomashow, Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center, as well as the chairman of the COPD Foundation Board of Directors, says now that more H1N1 vaccine is available, everyone—not just COPD patients— should get it.
“Most of us are broadening the usage of the vaccine,” Thomashow says, adding that COPD patients are “quite susceptible to the flu,” which has resulted in subsequent hospitalizations due to flu-related illness.
“For years I pushed all my COPD patients to get the regular flu vaccine every year. And now that we know that the H1N1 vaccine is well tolerated, I recommend that everyone with COPD should get that vaccine,” he says. “Most people over the age of 65 may have some degree of immunity [to it] but now there’s enough of the vaccine for everyone to get it.”
Thomashow recommends COPD patients get the “killed” vaccine, or the shot, instead of the nasal spray.
“[It’s] in part because the inhalation itself is irritating to the airwaves, which can potentially trigger bigger problems,” he explains. “With the live vaccine, COPD patients are more likely to get a flu-like illness, so the risks are a little bit higher.”
The H1N1 vaccine can either be delivered via shot (an Inactivated Vaccine) or nasal spray (the Attenuated Intranasal Vaccine). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the shot is a vaccine that contains the killed virus and is injected into the muscle, similar to the annual flu shot. The nasal spray is a mist that is sprayed in the nose.
Turco says when students return to campus January 4th, there will be clinics set up for anyone who wants the H1N1 vaccine.
“We’re going to enter this term with the same surveillance and recommendations and aggressiveness and see what happens,” he says. “If we start to see a recurrence of cases, we’ll be doing everything we did during the fall term.”

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