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Looking Ahead To The Rest Of The Flu Season

 

 

# 4164

 

 

What happens next with the 2009-2010 flu season is a big, open question.  One that I recently wrote about in Waiting For The Other Flu To Drop.    

 

 

With more than 4 months of our traditional Northern Hemisphere flu season remaining, will we see a return of seasonal flu?

 

Or will novel H1N1 supplant them, as H3N2 did in 1968, H2N2 did in 1957, and H1N1 did in 1918?

 

Today Bloomberg News has a long, and informative report on the prospects of seeing a return of the seasonal viruses this year.  It features interviews with a number of well known names in the flu world, including Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch, University of Michigan’s Arnold Monto, and Vanderbuilt’s William Schaffner.

 

While nothing is writ in stone at this point, with each passing day it appears less likely that we will see a resurgence of seasonal flu this year.   

 

Of course . . . Influenza is, as they say, unpredictable. 

 

And even if H1N1 supplants the other influenza `A’ strains, the future of influenza `B’ seems less clear.

 


The flu season isn’t over until it’s over.   And as last summer proved, sometimes it isn’t over even then.

 

This from Bloomberg News.

 

 

Swine Flu May Mean Seasonal Strain Won’t Emerge in U.S. Winter

 

By Tom Randall

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Seasonal flu, which annually kills 30,000 Americans, may not appear in the U.S. for the first time in more than 40 years, crowded out by the swine flu pandemic and mass vaccination campaigns.

 

Seasonal strains are almost nonexistent in reports from countries where swine flu, or H1N1, has taken hold. In the U.S. and Europe, 99 percent of influenza cases tested last week were H1N1, according to government reports. Seasonal versions of virus that usually arrive in December and peak in February may not emerge at all, said Marc Lipsitch, a flu tracker at the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston.

 

“I would bet against a seasonal flu this year,” said Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology, in a telephone interview. “But I wouldn’t bet very much money.”

 

One of the seasonal strains most likely to appear this year, known as type B, was responsible for 7 of 478 positive cases in a testing sample for the week ended Dec. 5, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A second form, H3N2, hasn’t been spotted at all.

 

(Continue . . . )

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