Rough flu season may be right around the corner, officials warn
This could be a particularly rough flu season, officials warned Thursday — possibly made worse by the spate of recent hurricanes and wildfires that have disrupted medical routines and forced people into close contact at shelters.
Anyone over 6 months old should be getting an annual flu shot, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said at a news conference in Washington encouraging Americans to get vaccinated.
Flu seasons, which usually start as early as October, range in severity, depending on the circulating strains of the virus. Since 2010, annual hospitalizations blamed on the flu ranged from 140,000 to 710,000 and deaths from 12,000 to 56,000, Price said.
Nearly 47 percent of Americans got the vaccine last year, a 1.2 percent increase from the year before, but still not good enough, Price said.
The flu vaccine does not offer perfect protection, said William Schaffner, medical director of National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, an independent education and training organization that led Thursday’s news conference.
The vaccine is effective 40 to 60 percent of the time, he said, but it also reduces the risk of severe disease and hospitalization. “With the ‘pretty good’ vaccine we can do an awful lot of good,” Schaffner said.
Hurricanes in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean and fires in the West may add a new dimension this year by interfering with medical routines for those who have been displaced, Kjersti Aagaard, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, told USA TODAY.
And with people in shelters or bunking with family members, viruses can pass more easily, she said. “We’re hitting the flu season kind of with a perfect storm,” Aagaard said.
The Southern Hemisphere, where winter has just ended, had a worse-than-usual season for flu, Aagaard said. “We’re all concerned we will have a heavy influenza outbreak. It’s not uncommon that we pattern what happens in the far south,” she said.
This year’s vaccine is expected to be a good match for the virus that is circulating, Price said, and there should be plenty: up to 166 million doses available in the U.S.