Preventing and Controlling Spread of Influenza in Healthcare Settings - Essay Sample

Influenza is a virus that can be easily spread from person to person and kills thousands of people each year. Healthcare workers are at risk of exposing themselves to infectious diseases from patients and material and, therefore, can also potentially transmit these diseases to others. Preventing and controlling the spread of vaccine-preventable diseases in the healthcare setting is vital to ensure proper infection control practices should an outbreak occur. As such, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) strongly recommend vaccination of healthcare workers.

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In the history of public health on influenza, it is appropriate to note that there is no consensus about where the influenza virus came from. In the years 1918 and 1919, the disease was first reported in the world (Zhang et al., 2017). The United States of America was the first nation to be affected by the virus among the military members (Zhang et al., 2017). The history provides that about 500 million people were infected with influenza (Zhang et al., 2017).

The behavior of the people before the disease was conventional. People engaged in their usual activities such as economic, social, and cultural activities. Life was as usual, and people enjoyed what they used to do. Everyone engaged in the activities that each was supposed to undertake without fear. General, the behavior antecedent related to influenza was standard.

The disease was first reported in the US among the military personnel in the year 1918. The disease quickly spread to many other parts of the world. The disease was easily transmitted from one person to another through respiratory droplets (Russell et al., 2018). Thus, the disease later spread to all parts of the world. A majority of the nations suffered to infections leading to the stop of many usual activities.

The proposed research design for this study will be descriptive. The survey will involve getting data about the disease from different sources to include the internet, books, questionnaires, and an online poll-fish considering the current world situation on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The sample size will be 100 people, where the respondents will be chosen from various fields, including the health care sector. The study will seek to identify factors that caused the spread and the measures taken to prevent its spread. Additionally, the study will seek to identify factors influencing the current immunization program among health care workers. The research design chosen is faced with some hardships, among them the poor network connection to access online platforms by the target participants. The current global COVID-19 situation is also a weakness that the design will face. However, through the design, data will be obtained without breaking the mitigating measures for the spread of COVID-19.

Reference

Russell, A. B., Trapnell, C., & Bloom, J. D. (2018). Extreme heterogeneity of influenza virus infection in single cells. Elife, 7, e32303.

Zhang, Y., Aevermann, B. D., Anderson, T. K., Burke, D. F., Dauphin, G., Gu, Z., ... & Li, X. (2017). Influenza Research Database: An integrated bioinformatics resource for influenza virus research. Nucleic acids research, 45(D1), D466-D474.