Vaccinating schoolchildren against the flu protects elderly people from the sometimes deadly virus, too, according to a huge study in Japan, the only country ever to focus flu-control efforts on youngsters.
From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, about two-thirds of Japanese schoolchildren were vaccinated under a government program. The number of flu deaths dropped by about 43,000 each year, mostly among the elderly, amounting to one death prevented for every 420 children vaccinated.
When the government phased out the program in the 1990s, death rates from the flu and its complications returned to their prior level, according to researchers in Japan and at this country's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"It's a pretty clever idea," said Dr. Stephen Gluckman, chief of infectious disease clinical services at University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. He said the strategy should be considered in the U.S.
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