*Flashback Friday*
*This post originally appeared on The PediaBlog on January 27, 2020.
Year Of The Rat
Having had its way with both immunized and unimmunized Americans this influenza season, influenza B/Victoria — the predominant strain causing so much flu-like illnesses in this region and around the country — is showing signs of fizzling out, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week. It turns out that this season’s influenza vaccine is not particularly effective against influenza B, which has dominated over influenza A strains for the first time in 30 years.
It’s good news that the major strain is now in decline. The bad news, says Julia Ries, is that influenza A (H1N1) is gaining its footing, and is about to strike hard. If you got sick once this winter with influenza B, it is possible you could get the flu again in the same season, this time with influenza A:
Now, halfway through flu season, A strains are picking up, increasing the odds we’ll have a “double-barreled flu season,” in which two strains strike back to back — a pattern health experts say is extremely rare.
This season’s flu vaccine provides much better coverage for influenza A (H1N1), so immunized people should be offered greater protection. But annual flu vaccination isn’t going to protect anyone from the next big threat: novel coronavirus. The CDC summarized a rapidly evolving situation late last week:
CDC is closely monitoring an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (termed “2019-nCoV”) that was first detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China and which continues to expand. Chinese health officials have reported hundreds of infections with 2019-nCoV in China, including outside of Hubei Province. Infections with 2019-nCoV also are being reported in a growing number of countries internationally, including the United States, where the first 2019-nCoV infection was detected in a traveler returning from Wuhan on January 21, 2020.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that more than 900 people in China were infected with coronavirus, which has a predilection for causing severe respiratory infections including sometimes-fatal pneumonia. Because the virus is “novel”, or new, humans haven’t yet evolved immunologic “memory” in order to fight it. This is why previous novel coronavirus outbreaks — SARS-CoV in 2002-2003 in China and MERS-CoV in the Middle East (known as “camel fever”) — were so deadly.
Chinese health authorities have placed a travel restriction for 12 cities in central China, “effectively penning in 35 million residents — nearly the population of Canada — in an effort to contain the dangerous coronavirus”:
Just one day after China restricted travel in and from the center of the outbreak, Wuhan, a city of 11 million and the capital of Hubei Province, and four nearby towns, the government announced plans to suspend public transportation services covering more than half the population of the province
The rapidly expanding outbreak has overwhelmed the Chinese province’s hospitals and fueled fears of a global pandemic. Chinese health officials reported on Friday that there had been 26 deaths from the outbreak and more than 900 cases of the coronavirus, a sharp increase.
All the deaths reported so far have been in China. Most have been older patients, but included a 36-year-old man.
CNN reported on Friday that the risk to other Americans at this time is low:
Sixty-three people from 22 states are under investigation for the virus, health officials said. Eleven of the 63 tested negative for the virus and two, the Chicago patient and the Washington patient, tested positive. The CDC says there are likely to be many more under investigation in the coming days.
The immediate health risk from Wuhan coronavirus to the general American public is considered low at this time, according to the CDC.
“We understand that some people are worried about this virus and how it may impact Americans. While this situation poses a very serious public health threat, CDC believes that the immediate risk to the US public is low at this time but the situation continues to evolve rapidly,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
Five cases of coronavirus were confirmed over the weekend in the U.S. — one in Chicago, one in Washington state, two in California, and one case in Arizona in patients who arrived there after traveling to Wuhan. By Sunday, more than 2,000 people in 14 countries and territories were reported to have contracted the infection. 80 have died so far, most of them older and frail with compromised immune systems.
All of this comes at a bad time. It’s holiday season in Asia, when people travel widely to visit family and friends to celebrate the Chinese New Year. (Saturday’s new moon marked the start of the Lunar New Year.)
It is only fitting that 2020 is being slammed by influenza’s double-whammy and, now, hammered by coronavirus. It is, after all, the Year of the Rat.
source https://www.thepediablog.com/2023/01/27/flashback-friday-243/
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