Most people may come to remember this as a flu season with two faces. Its most appealing side can be found in government statistics that paint it as a year much like any other.
Stop by the office coffeemaker, though, and the flu grows fangs, tormenting sufferers with muscle aches, sulfuric sore throats and nightly boiler-room fevers.
"Most years, flu hits people like a truck. This year, it was a cement truck, with much worse headaches, body aches, nausea, cough and fever," family physician Thomas Weida of Penn State Hershey Medical Center in Hershey, Pa., said Monday.
"I saw a lot more flu cases turning into other things, other types of infections. They'd have flu for four or five days, start getting better and, boom, something else would set in," Weida says, emphasizing that he's just relating his impressions because he and his colleagues don't routinely test their patients for flu.
Today, flu activity appears to be waning nationwide, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention update released Friday. Forty-two states reported widespread flu and eight regional activity, and Washington, D.C., reported local clusters of cases. Since September, the CDC has logged 41 reports of pediatric deaths, still far below the 60 reported last year.
"There's a good chance we've seen the worst of it," says CDC epidemiologist Anthony Fiore, cautioning that nevertheless, "we may see another peak."
The government statistics, from multiple sources, indicate that this season was anything but a standout, either in terms of the number of cases or the duration or severity of illness.
But flu isn't uniform across the country, Fiore says. "It moves in lots and lots of little waves. There are some communities out there that still haven't seen the worst of it."
Pediatrician Gregory Hayden of Charlottesville, Va., says the year has been routine. "We kept waiting for it to hit in our offices, but my sense is that it's an ordinary flu season for us. It doesn't seem to be unusually severe or heavy."
Flu vaccinations didn't blunt this year's epidemic as much as usual, because only one of the three predominant flu strains circulating were covered by the vaccine, which will be overhauled next year.
Despite the coverage gaps, however, the vaccine still retained some effectiveness, says James Turner, director of student health at the University of Virginia. "We're the only provider giving flu vaccine, so we know how well it's working."
About 3,000 students were vaccinated and 16,000 were not, Turner says. The attack rate among unvaccinated students was 30% higher, which means the vaccine was 30% effective, he says, down from about 70%. Students who were vaccinated but got the flu anyway, he says, seemed to get less sick and rebound quicker than those who weren't vaccinated.
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