With many Americans worried about their safety should a flu pandemic occur, there’s little reassurance from a survey that finds that close to half of U.S. public health-care workers would not show up for work if such a pandemic occurred. In fact, two-thirds of the 308 employees polled said their work would put them at risk of contracting the potentially deadly flu should an outbreak come to pass. ‘Forty-two percent of the health care workers surveyed said they would not respond in the event of a flu pandemic,’ said study co-author Dr. Daniel J. Barnett, an instructor at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore. ‘The most important factor, in terms of showing up for work, was how much the individual employee perceived his or her role [to be] in the agency’s response,’ he added. The less important an employee thought his or her role was, the less likely they were to report for work, Barrett said. Just 40 percent of the employees felt that they would be asked to show up should a pandemic become a reality. In addition, only 33 percent thought they were knowledgeable about the health impact […]