Last flu season was one of deadliest for kids

NEW YORK — The past flu season was the deadliest for U.S. children in nearly a decade, health officials said Friday.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said they have received reports of 172 pediatric flu deaths since October. That surpasses the 2012-2013 flu season, when there were 171. An average season sees about 110.

This past winter had the most pediatric flu deaths since the CDC started counting them in 2004.

The Ohio Department of Health, as of May 19, reported four pediatric deaths for the 2017-2018 flu season.

Among all ages, there were 17,397 hospitalizations, compared with 8,661 the prior season.

The past flu season wasn’t a pandemic, but it was long — 19 weeks. It also was unusually intense, with high levels of illness reported in nearly every state for weeks on end.

The season was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly.

Making a bad year worse, the flu vaccine didn’t work very well.

Some of the children who died this past year were too young for the shots. The CDC has vaccination information only on about 140 of the children who died who were old enough to be vaccinated. Of those, only about 1 in 5 received the vaccine before becoming ill, CDC officials said.

About half the children who died didn’t have a diagnosed health condition that might have made them more vulnerable to the flu, the CDC said.

The CDC doesn’t keep an exact count of adult flurelated deaths.