Flu picking up in US and UK

[Guest guest]

Quote from the article:

January and February typically are the worst flu months, and it can drag into March. And this winter, a well-known nasty strain of Type A flu is causing most of the illnesses so far in the U.S. This so-called H3N2 branch of the flu family tends to trigger more pneumonia and other complications than other forms of influenza.

It's a different story overseas, where swine flu has returned to hit Britain hard and vaccine again is running low there. European health authorities warned the bug was sure to reach the continent next and urged a last-minute effort at boosting vaccinations in countries like France and Germany where protection historically is low.

This year's vaccine does offer triple protection — against the swine flu known formally as Type A H1N1 flu, the worrisome H3N2 strain, and the Type B flu that tends to be less severe.

And the U.S. produced more than 160 million doses this year, a record amount. Last year, nearly 114 million doses of seasonal vaccine were used, but lots of the special swine flu vaccine went to waste because it didn't arrive until that outbreak was waning and people had lost interest.

The challenge is getting more people to use this plentiful supply in a year that so far hasn't made much news about illness that can drive vaccination, says Dr. Temte of the University of Wisconsin and the American Academy of Family Physicians. He pushes his own patients to be vaccinated, and this year had so many shot-haters flock to the nasal-spray FluMist version that he had to order a second batch.

Dr. Nafziger is caring for "a ton" of flu patients in the emergency room at the University of Alabama Birmingham — and she makes a point of asking why they didn't avoid the misery by getting vaccinated, in hopes they'll remember the lesson.

"Most of the time they don't show a lot of remorse," she says, surprised.

The CDC says the flu so far is striking very hard in parts of the South — Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — and New York City. Illinois and Oklahoma also are reporting high levels of flu. It's what Jernigan calls expected levels for the leading edge of the winter's outbreak — and that latest count is for the last week of December, the holiday lull when lots of people are home from school and work and thus not trading germs as widely as usual.

Enough Americans either caught swine flu or were vaccinated against it during the last flu season that it's having a difficult time returning here this year, Jernigan says, but a smaller proportion of Britain's population entered this winter similarly protected. Here, the predominant H3N2 strain tends to be especially hard on the very young and very old, he warns.

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This is hitting the South so badly this year because there are a lot of people on the dole and with low educations. That's not being insulting, you can look up the demographics of various locations and see this is so. Not all mind you, but there are regions like that. Birmingham is a Democrat tilted area that has managed to get itself in a lot of trouble over the last few years because of corrupt city management and the water/sewer plan.