Word: influenza
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...question now on health officials' minds is: Will there be a second wave of cases in the new year? The answer depends on whom you ask. "We took an informal poll of about a dozen of some of the world's leading experts in influenza," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters recently. "About half of them said, Yes, we think it's likely that we'll have another surge in cases. About half said, No, we think it's not likely. And one said, Flip a coin...
...accurate reflection of how unpredictable the influenza virus can be. Although flu activity has been waning for the third week in a row, health officials warn that there are still four to five months left in the official influenza season, plenty of time for the virus to make its rounds and find new hosts. "The story of pandemics, and the story of H1N1 in general, is the story of persistent uncertainty where we never quite know what we are going to get or when," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University...
...seems depends on what you use as a measuring stick. Compared with previous pandemics, like the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 20 million people and infected up to 40% of the world's population, or even the far less deadly 1957 and 1968 bouts with a strain of H1N1 influenza similar to the 2009 strain, things don't seem as bad this time around. Fewer people are getting severely ill when infected, and fewer have died or required hospitalization from the flu than in previous pandemics. (See what you need to know about the H1N1 vaccine...
...second wave could still prove more deadly than the seasonal flu, especially for young children. To date, 189 children have died of influenza in the U.S., the majority of them related to H1N1 infection, and that number is already higher than the total number of pediatric deaths attributed to flu in 2008. Lipsitch says that if current trends hold, H1N1 may end up causing as many influenza deaths, if not more, than the seasonal flu, which kills about 36,000 Americans each year. Instead of hitting the elderly the hardest, though, most of the deaths may be among young children...
...H1N1 Vaccine With the world already grappling with a pandemic of 2009 H1N1 influenza, no treatment was more hotly anticipated or more in demand in the U.S. (and the rest of the northern hemisphere) than the new H1N1 vaccine when flu season officially kicked off in the fall. Despite the fact that the vaccine had proved effective in trials with one dose - rather than two, as researchers had originally expected - the vaccine supply from U.S. manufacturers still couldn't keep pace with demand in the first weeks of October, when the first million or so shots rolled off production lines...