Early season, severe flu strain sweeps nation
January 12, 2013
Chances are that you or someone you know has been chained to the bed recently with fever, fatigue, sore throat and muscle aches.
That's because the current flu season is turning out to be a bad one, affecting more people than usual, starting earlier and covering a broader geographical area.
Government health experts say 18 children have died because of the seasonal flu and 2,257 people had been hospitalized with flu symptoms through the end of December.
"The sense that everybody has is that there's been an extremely rapid increase in influenza," said Trish Perl, co-leader of a flu study encompassing about 100 clinics in several cities. She is also an epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore.
The public should be concerned, said Gregory Poland, professor of medicine and infectious disease at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
"A decade ago, when we had widespread circulation (of the seasonal flu), we had 70,000 deaths in the U.S.," said Poland, who directs Mayo's Vaccine Research Group. "We have this cultural thing in the U.S. about, 'Oh, it's just the flu.' I was telling a group yesterday, imagine in October I said, 'We expect a virus to be circulating in the U.S. and it will kill 30- or 40,000 Americans.' Can you imagine the panic that would ensue?"

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Posted by Ken at 12:00 AM