Influenza vaccination programs, which cost nations millions of dollars every year, could be a waste of time and money, says Dr. Tom Jefferson of Cochrane Vaccines Field, based in Rome, Italy.

The leading health expert studied the effects of inactivated vaccines (vaccines with dead viruses) and concluded that flu shot campaigns have either no effect, or a very negligible effect, on the number of hospitalizations, work/school time lost, complications from flu, or death from flu.

"I looked at the evidence described by systematic reviews and confronted it with policy and I found that there is a massive gap. Almost none of the benefits that these policy documents list are actually given by inactivated vaccines or, if they are, they are given in slighter measure," says Jefferson, who co-ordinates the vaccine group at the Cochrane Collaboration in Rome, which reviews health treatments.

The researcher suggests the ineffectiveness of flu vaccine could be a result of diagnosing too many influenza-like respiratory illnesses as flu (when they are not).

"In most surveillance systems, you actually have an almost year-round epidemic which, in fact, is not influenza. It's caused by other agents," Jefferson says.

"This confusion leads to a gross overestimation of the impact of influenza, unrealistic expectations of the performance of vaccines and spurious certainty of our ability to predict viral circulation and impact," he wrote in the British Medical Journal.

Approximately 200,000 Americans ge thospitalized with flu each year, and about 36,000 people die each year as a result of catching flu in the USA.

SOURCE: The British Medical Journal (BMJ), October 28.