Taxi flu ‘epidemic’: most cabbies unvaccinated

Catch a cab — and the flu! Only 17.7 percent of New York cabbies bothered to get influenza vaccines, endangering themselves and their passengers, according to a new study.

“Because taxi drivers come in contact with large numbers of people, neglecting to vaccinate them may put them at risk for contracting influenza . . . and then also for becoming ‘superspreaders’ of influenza infection,” warn researchers from the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences department at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Airflow dynamics in a taxi espe cially compound the problem, the study’s authors note.

An Australian study found that flutransmission risk in a cab ranges from 59 percent to 99.9 percent for a 90minute trip.

There are about 100,000 taxi drivers in the city, each of whom shares “close quarters” with about 150 passengers a week, according to the study, the first to target hacks’ vaccination rates.

The paltry cabby immunization rate is well below the 39 percent rate for adults in the United States, the authors note.

Researchers found that with the most common barrier to immunization is that most drivers just don’t see the need for a shot.

One solution could be tailored workplaceintervention campaigns. A freeflushot initiative held at an unidentified city taxi garage in February 2014 bumped immunization rates to 44 percent, the authors report.

“For drivers, time is money, and no extra time needed to be expended for the drivers to be vaccinated,” according to the study, which appears in the April edition of the journal Vaccine.