Officials predict tough flu season

3 children in Florida have died as result of virus so far this year

Serese Marotta lost her 5-year-old son Joseph to the flu during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

It was a new strain of the flu virus that sickened more than 100 million people in the United States and killed more than 300 children.

After her son’s passing, the doctor told her that Joseph was the 85th child to die from the flu that year.

“And I remember looking at her just incredulous and I was like, ‘What? Healthy children don’t die from the flu. Healthy people don’t die from the flu,’ ” Marotta said. “I never realized until that happened to us that this happened every year. Healthy children and adults of all ages and lifestyles and gender and ethnicity can be hospitalized or lose their life to flu.”

Marotta’s mission has since been raising awareness about how dangerous the flu can be.

“The flu vaccines that we have currently available to us do save lives, do prevent hospitalizations, do help prevent illness, so it’s critically important for people to be

vaccinated,” said Marotta, the chief operating officer of a 15-year-old national nonprofit called Families Fighting Flu, based in Virgina.

So far this year, the deaths of 27 children have been linked to the flu. Three of those deaths have been in Florida, and the children had not gotten a flu shot, according to the Florida Department of Health.

The state doesn’t identify the children’s county of residence to protect the families’ privacy.

Health officials expect the current flu season to be more severe than last year and potentially on par with the severe 2017-2018 flu season, which killed nearly 80,000 people in the United States.

So far this year, 2,900 deaths nationwide have been attributed to the flu and about 55,000 people have been hospitalized.

The flu activity in Florida hasn’t been as high as many other states, according to the latest available data from the CDC.

While most states have reported high flu activity, Florida and eight other states have reported moderate activity so far. Still, geographically, flu has spread across the state and it’s activity continues to increase.

“The flu season has started a little bit earlier than usual,” said Dr. Tim Hendrix, medical director of Advent-Health Centra Care.

It’s too soon to tell when the flu season will reach its peak, but “generally, we count on the peak [of flu season] being on the last week of January, first week of February,” Hendrix said.

He said that data from the Centra Care centers in Central Florida show that the flu activity has been higher than the last flu season. But will it be worst than the severe 2017-2018 season?

“Shall I make a prediction? I bet it’s going to be somewhere between last year (2018-2019) and the year before,” Hendrix said. “Get your flu shot. There’s still time. It’s not just about getting the flu shots and keeping yourself from getting the flu. It’s about keeping your family safe.”

If you start experiencing the flu symptoms such as fever, cough, headache and body ache, got to the doctor to get tested for the flu. Prescription Antiviral medications can shorten the length of your illness, but you need to be diagnosed within the first 24 to 48 hours of the flu onset for the drugs to be effective.

The predominant circulating virus this season is influenza B, which is contagious like other types of influenza.

Elderly and young children have had the highest rate of hospitalizations so far this year, according to the CDC.

The flu vaccine is recommended for people 6 months and older, unless they’re advised by medical professionals not to get vaccinated because of other health conditions. But increasing flu vaccination rates has been a riddle for public health officials.

According to a survey by the CDC, a little over 60% of children from 6 months to 17 years old and about 45% of adults 18 years and older get the flu shot each year.

Researchers say there are several factors behind the lackluster compliance.

Some people still think the flu shot is for older adults and people with chronic health conditions, while others mistakenly believe that the flu vaccine causes the flu. Meanwhile, many have either have not had the flu or they’ve had it and found it manageable.

“Most people don’t see really the bad cases of influenza,” said Glen Nowak, director of Center for Health and Risk Communication at the University of Georgia. “It’s a good thing that [the bad cases] don’t happen very often, but the fact that they can happen is not something that people have good awareness of.”

It doesn’t help that the flu shot isn’t as effective against the virus as many other vaccines. That’s because unlike other viruses, the flu virus changes every year and researchers are always playing catch up, while marveling at its survival skills.

“If you look at humans, we have some 25,000 genes and the flu virus has 10,” said Dr. Richard Webby, director of World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“But look at the impact that something that has 10 genes can have on the population, that can survive from year to year and come back every year and cause this much disease. It’s quite remarkable.”

It’s too soon to tell how good a match this year’s vaccine is against the circulating viruses, but still, the flu vaccine is an effective public health tools.

“Even in the year when the vaccine is not as closely matched as we would like, we still think that it provides, particularly in the severe end of the spectrum, some protection, so I think that the more people that get vaccinated, the less deaths there would be,” said Webby.