TORONTO - Canadians don't seem to see the H1N1 virus as a personal threat, and few currently plan to get vaccinated against the virus, a new poll indicates.
The Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll suggests interest in the swine flu vaccine has declined in Canada, with only a third of people now saying they will get the shot, compared to 45 per cent in late August.
"I think that that's a significant decline. And it indicates ... either a higher level of confusion over what the right approach is, or a lower sense of risk," Doug Anderson, senior vice-president at Harris-Decima, said Thursday.
Ironically the poll findings come at a time when the federal government is under intense pressure to fast-track approval of the H1N1 vaccine so that immunization efforts can begin sooner than the projected early November launch. Canada has purchased 50.4 million doses of the pandemic vaccine.
"They're certainly disappointing and maybe a bit dismaying," Dr. Perry Kendall, British Columbia's chief medical officer of health, said of the findings.
Kendall said a national public awareness campaign will be launched to try to improve understanding of the benefits of the vaccine and to persuade people the product is safe, effective and in their best interest to take.
"At the end of the day I rather suspect that it will depend on people's perceptions of risk," he said of the likely uptake.
The poll, conducted from Oct. 1 to 5, suggests at this point people don't believe this virus will have much impact on their lives.
Only 11 per cent of people described themselves as very concerned about H1N1, and 25 per cent said they were somewhat concerned. Nearly two-thirds of people said they either were not very concerned or weren't concerned at all about H1N1.
Three-quarters of Canadians surveyed felt they would be exposed to seasonal flu this winter, but only 45 per cent felt they would be exposed to the pandemic virus.
Only five per cent of respondents felt they were very likely to contract swine flu, and 72 per cent felt they were not that likely or not likely at all to get infected with the new virus. In contrast, 18 per cent felt they were very likely to get sick with seasonal flu.
The apparent belief that seasonal flu poses a greater risk at this point than the pandemic virus flies in the face of the virological reports of what flu viruses are circulating in the world at this point.
While they haven't disappeared altogether -- and while no one can predict what the winter will bring -- there has been limited seasonal flu activity globally since the emergence of the new virus earlier this year.
"I think it speaks to the fact that although the media have been accused of hyping this (H1N1), clearly the message that seems to have gotten through is people ... don't see it as a threat," said Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infectious diseases prevention and control at the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion.
"It would be far easier to go down this road if it was a more virulent virus. And I'm not wishing that it's a more virulent virus. That's one of the reasons why it's got us in this weird sort of pickle."
The poll suggests half of people don't plan to get any flu shot at all this year. Of the 50 per cent who do, 27 per cent said they would get both seasonal and pandemic flu shots. In total, 33 per cent indicated they would get an H1N1 shot and 36 per cent said they'd get a seasonal flu shot.
Those numbers actually align pretty closely with the percentage of the population that rolls up its sleeve for flu shots in regular years -- further proof, Gardam said, that suggests people don't see the pandemic virus as a greater-than-normal threat at this point.
"They look at it as sort of same-old same-old. And the majority of people don't get vaccinated for seasonal flu, so why would they change now?"
Dr. Kumanan Wilson, a public health researcher at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, said the findings illustrate that the public is confused about the various viruses and the two vaccines.
"This isn't easy to understand," he admitted.
"There's a lot of confusion about how worried they should be about both the seasonal flu and H1N1. And I think the message from this is that these are the questions that public health officials need to answer."
The pollsters interviewed 1,000 people across the country for the survey, which has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
