Battle of the bug

Izabella, a 27-year-old lawyer, rolls up her sleeve. "Look," she said, pointing to a big bruise on the top of her arm. "You should have seen it a couple of days ago. It was twice as bad."

The culprit, said Izabella, was the influenza vaccination shot she and her colleagues received free of charge from the Warsaw law firm where they work.

"You know how it is: the firm wants you to work and not be sick, so they arrange for us to receive these flu shots," she said.

The notion of having an annual flu vaccination is becoming more popular in Poland. According to Lidia Brydak, director of the World Health Organization's (WHO) National Influenza Center and a virologist with the State Hygiene Institute, during the 2000-2001 flu-epidemic season (September-March) almost 4 million Poles lined up for their yearly flu jab.

And this epidemic season Brydak is hoping even more people will be vaccinated, either through the generosity of their employer or by paying the zł. 30 for a single dose themselves.

"For me, it's no problem to tell people that if you like to live, if you like to have a job - because it's very difficult to find a job these days - then you should think seriously about an influenza vaccination," Brydak said.

But Poles haven't always been this serious about the flu. Under communism, Brydak said flu vaccination rates in Poland were much lower because the locally made vaccine was of poor quality and there was little public education about vaccination.

In the 1992-1993 season, when Poland received its first batch of imported influenza vaccines, Brydak said the number of Poles getting the jab was 0.52 doses per 1,000 people. During the last epidemic season, the rate reached 92.8 doses per 1,000 people.

And Brydak is careful to point out that the flu virus, which attacks the body's respiratory system, can be fatal. The most recent data from the Central Statistical Office (GUS) indicates that 2.3 million people contracted the flu in 1999. Brydak estimates that influenza kills at least 400 people a year. In 1971, on the tails of a flu pandemic, around 6,000 people in Poland fell victim to the flu. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the 40 million who died across the world in the 1918 flu pandemic.

As for future pandemics, Brydak said the WHO is recommending that governments implement some sort of contingency plan now. Brydak said she will be asking the government to provide free vaccinations for those who cannot afford them, and also for people in high-risk categories such as the elderly and people with chronic respiratory problems.

And Brydak said there could even be a more ominous factor in flu epidemics of the future: terrorism.

"From my knowledge, it would be possible to use influenza for terrorism because this a very, very infectious virus," she said. "If you fly in a plane and one passenger has flu, there is a 70% chance that others will catch it."

A chilling thought indeed.

Celia Barnes