US flu season poised to be milder than last year's harsh one

Source: AP news

It’s early, but the current flu season is shaping up to be gentler than last winter’s unusually brutal one, U.S. health officials said.

In most parts of the country, most illnesses right now are being caused by a flu strain that leads to fewer hospitalizations and deaths as the kind of flu that dominated a year ago, according to officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vaccines also work better against it, said the CDC’s Dr. Alicia Fry.

Last season, an estimated 49 million Americans got sick from the flu, 23 million went for medical care and 960,000 were hospitalized.
An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications — the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades. In recent years, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC.

Some doctors and nurses were anxious going into this flu season, considering how bad last year was, said Dr. James Steinberg, chief medical officer at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta. But so far it hasn’t been nearly as severe. “It seems more like a typical flu season,” he said.

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