Early flu season accelerates; no peak yet, CDC says
The
nation’s early flu season continued to grow in the U.S. this week, with
no sign yet of a peak in the spread of coughing, achy, feverish
illness, health officials said Friday.
"I think we're still accelerating," said Tom Skinner, a CDC spokesman.
Twenty-nine
states and New York City reported high levels of flu activity, up from
16 states and NYC the previous week. Flu was widespread in 41 states, up
from 31 states, according to the latest figures from the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
As of the week ending
Dec. 29, 2,257 people had been hospitalized with flu, and 18 children
had died from complications of the illness, CDC reported.
“It’s about five weeks ahead of the average flu season,”
said Lyn Finelli, lead of the surveillance and response team that
monitors influenza for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and
Respiratory Diseases. “We haven’t seen such an early season since 2003
to 2004.”
That’s the year that Joe Lastinger’s 3-year-old daughter, Emily, fell ill with the flu in late January and died five days later.
“That
was the first really bad season for children in a while,” said
Lastinger, 40, who lives near Dallas, Texas. “For whatever reason that’s
not well understood, it affected her and it killed her.”
During
that season, illnesses peaked in early to mid-December, followed by a
peak in flu-related pneumonia and deaths in early January. It was over
by mid-February and was considered a “moderately severe” season for flu,
according to the CDC. Finelli and other CDC officials say it’s too
early to tell exactly how bad this year’s season will be.
But over at Google Flu Trends,
which monitors flu activity in the U.S. and around the world based on
internet search terms, this year’s season has already topped the
bright-red “intense” category.
And at Flu Near You,
a new real-time tracking tool that’s gaining about 100 participants
each week, about 4 percent of the 10,000 users say they’ve come down
with flu symptoms.
“That’s huge,” says John
Brownstein, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at
Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. “Last year, we
never got near this.”
Brownstein is one of the
founders of the project coordinated by Children’s Hospital Boston, the
Skoll Global Threats Fund and the American Public Health Association.
Though it’s still in its early stages, it already has generated new,
interesting and, most of all, immediate data about this year’s flu
season.
“It’s what we call ‘nowcasting,’” Brownstein said. “It’s a more up-to-date view.”
CDC data, which is based on visits to doctors for influenza-like illness, can lag two weeks or more behind real-time activity.
By contrast, Flu Near You can paint an immediate picture of what’s new with flu.
For
instance, Brownstein said his data show that cough is the most
frequently reported flu symptom this season, at 19 percent. It’s been
followed by sore throat, 16 percent; fatigue, 15 percent; headache, 14
percent; body ache, 10 percent and fever, just 7 percent.
More
telling, for people who reported both flu symptoms and vaccination
status, three-quarters of those who were not vaccinated got sick,
compared with 25 percent who got their flu shots.
Brownstein
cautioned that can’t be used as a true measure of this season’s vaccine
efficacy because of variables in reporting. But the CDC says that in
the 2010-2011 flu season, vaccine effectiveness was about 60 percent for
all age groups combined.
The agency has received
reports that people who were vaccinated still developed
laboratory-confirmed strains of flu. CDC officials said it’s not
possible to know whether that’s happening more this season than usual
and that the agency is “watching the situation closely.”
Overall,
this year’s vaccines appear to be well matched for the two strains of
influenza A and one strain of influenza B that are circulating this
year, CDC officials have said.
The dominant strain this year is the H3N2 strain, which can cause more serious illness. Flu
seasons can vary widely, but some years are severe, with
hospitalizations of up to 200,000 people and between 3,000 and 49,000
deaths during a season.
As of December 14, the
latest CDC figures available, about 127 million doses of flu vaccine
had been distributed, from about 135 million doses produced for this
season.
Joe Lastinger was one of the first to sign up
for the Flu Near You tracking program after its test phase. The health
care executive and father of three surviving children said it gives
participants information they can act on about flu in their communities.
“I’m
always excited about getting ahead of it,” he said. “This is a tool you
can use. If everybody starts reporting these symptoms, you’re ahead.”
Information
about vaccination is particularly important, said Lastinger. Flu
vaccinations weren’t routinely recommended for healthy children Emily’s
age back then, and Lastinger and his wife weren’t worried about it.
“For
us, vaccination was the thing we should have done, had we known,” he
said. “Flu needed to be up there on our parent radar of things to worry
about. We think it should be on every parent’s list.”
Related stories:
No comments:
Post a Comment