Flu Shot Campaign Starts Monday
Written by Jeremy Zafran on 28 October 2021
The annual flu shot campaign will launch in Kahnawake on Monday along with the rest of the province. Appointments can be booked beginning Friday through the KMHC and Clic-Sante. The doses will be administered at the Knights of Columbus.
Dawn Montour Lazare is the Manager of Outpatient Care with the Kateri Memorial Hospital Center joined us live on the Morning D. She says the numbers for the season flu were way down last year, mostly due to the mask, hygiene and distancing measures that were put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19:
“The Hygiene practices that we have right now, certainly plays a huge part in it, but I think a huge factor which they have not said, is that they haven’t been testing for the flu. They’ve been so overrun doing all the Covid testing that they haven’t been testing for the flu very much. I don’t know if that’s going to change this year, I mean the swabs that we do for Covid are the same swabs we would do for the flu.”
Juanita Belanger is the Infections Prevention and Control Nurse at the KMHC saying that the flu is far from gone:
“It still exists, of course it still exist. What we are seeing is that when there are multiple types of viruses circulating, there can be some competition. And so, you can have exposure to multiple viruses but you won’t get both of them at the same time, so it’s possible that there was some thing called ‘viral interference’ whereby more people were getting Covid because it was just more dominant. So, definitely the flu still exists.”
