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Unique Flu Experiment Reveals Why Some People Don’t Catch It Despite Exposure

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With an aggressive new strain spreading across the country, this year’s flu season has been marked by record-high hospitalizations and reportedly intense symptoms.

As people look for ways to contain the spread, new research has found that a few simple factors can greatly reduce transmission.

Researchers from the University of Maryland Schools of Public Health and Engineering in College Park and the School of Medicine in Baltimore studied influenza spread by placing flu-positive college students in a hotel room with healthy middle-aged adult volunteers. . .

The participants, including 11 healthy volunteers, lived on a quarantined floor of a Baltimore-area hotel for two weeks. During that time, they simulated interactions, including having conversations, doing physical activities like yoga, and passing around objects like pens and tablets from infected people to the rest of the group.

At the end of the experiment, none of the healthy individuals had become infected with the flu due to a variety of factors. This included a lack of coughing, as the infected students were holding “a lot of virus in their noses” and only small amounts were “expelled into the air,” the researchers noted. (Read more from “Unique Flu Experiment Reveals Why Some People Don’t Catch It Despite Exposure” HERE)

This Is How to Avoid the Flu While Flying

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By AP. Worried about catching a cold or the flu on an airplane? Get a window seat, and don’t leave it until the flight is over.

That’s what some experts have been saying for years, and it’s perhaps the best advice coming out of a new attempt to determine the risks of catching germs on an airplane.

It turns out there’s been little research on the risks of catching a cold or flu during air travel. Some experts believed that sitting in a window seat would keep a passenger away from infectious people who may be on the aisle or moving around. (Read more from “This Is How to Avoid the Flu While Flying” HERE)

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How to Avoid the Flu While Flying

By ABC News. 1. Wipe down communal surfaces such as tray tables and armrests

Dr. Nicholas Testa said that you should be wary of the communal hard surfaces on airplanes, such as tray tables or armrests. . .

2. Turn on your air vent . . .

3. Let other passengers board first

It is not just aboard airplanes that travelers should be cautious of flu germs. Thousands of passengers also pass through major airports across the country every day, standing close together in tightly packed lines. (Read more from “How to Avoid the Flu While Flying” HERE)

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Top World Doctor: Influenza Outbreak May Kill Hundreds of Millions, Wipe out Global Systems

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The big one is coming: a global virus pandemic that could kill 33 million victims in its first 200 days . . .

At the extreme, with disrupted supply of food and medicines and without enough survivors to run computer or energy systems, the global economy would collapse. Starvation and looting could lay waste to parts of the world.

It’s a disaster movie nightmare. Yet it is waiting to come true, thanks to influenza — the most diabolical, hardest-to-control and fastest-spreading potential viral killer known to humankind.

As a medical doctor and a health chief who has led global programmes at the World Health Organisation (WHO), I believe that the world is at risk of a viral pandemic that will be at least as deadly as anything we have ever known before.

We are just as vulnerable now as we were 100 years ago, when the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic infected a third of the world’s population and wiped out up to 100 million people. It remains the deadliest flu outbreak in history. (Read more from “Top World Doctor: Influenza Outbreak May Kill Hundreds of Millions, Wipe out Global Systems” HERE)

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Flu Kills up to 4,000 a Week, Causing 1 in 10 Deaths

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The amount of influenza ravaging the U.S. this year rivals levels normally seen when an altogether new virus emerges, decimating a vulnerable population that hasn’t had a chance to develop any defenses.

It’s an unexpected phenomenon that public health experts are still trying to decode.

The levels of influenza-like illnesses being reported now are as high as the peak of the swine flu epidemic in 2009, and exceed the last severe seasonal flu outbreak in 2003 when a new strain started circulating, said Anne Schuchat, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s acting director. Swine flu, which swept the globe in 2009 and 2010, sickened 60.8 million Americans, hospitalized 274,304 and killed 12,469, according to CDC data. Deaths from the current outbreak will likely far outstrip those of the 2009-2010 season.

“This is a difficult season, and we can’t predict how much longer the severe season will last,” she said. “I wish there was better news, but everything we are looking at is bad news.”

The primary type of influenza this year hasn’t changed enough from previous seasons to be considered a novel strain, Schuchat said. The agency’s virologists are studying it to determine if there are any other explanations for why it’s been so hard-hitting. (Read more from “Flu Kills up to 4,000 a Week, Causing 1 in 10 Deaths” HERE)

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Experimental Drug Promises to Kill the Flu Virus in Single Day

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2018 has been a devastating year for the flu. So far, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 63 pediatric deaths. And it’s not even the middle of February yet.

But now a Japanese drugmaker claims that it has developed a pill that can kill the virus within a day, The Wall Street Journal reports.

A late-stage trial on Japanese and American flu patients found that for the people who took the Shionogi & Co. compound, the median time taken to wipe out the virus was 24 hours. That is much quicker than any other flu drug on the market, including Roche AG’s Tamiflu, which the trial showed took three times longer to achieve the same result. Quickly killing the virus could reduce its contagious effects, Shionogi said.

Also, Shionogi’s experimental drug requires only a single dose, while patients need to take two doses of Tamiflu a day, for five days.

Both Shionogi’s compound and Tamiflu take roughly the same amount of time to entirely contain flu symptoms, but Shionogi says its compound provides immediate relief faster.

(Read more from “Experimental Drug Promises to Kill the Flu Virus in Single Day” HERE)

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Think Flu Season Is Bad? It Might Get Even Worse

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By Bloomberg. The influenza virus that’s sickened millions of Americans this season is already the most widespread outbreak since public health authorities began keeping track more than a dozen years ago. Now, with the threat of more strains emerging, it might get even worse.

“Flu is everywhere in the U.S. right now,” said Dan Jernigan, director of the influenza division at the national Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “This is the first year we have had the entire continental U.S. be the same color on the graph, meaning there is widespread activity in all of the continental U.S. at this point.”

The most optimistic assumption among government experts is that the season peaked a few weeks ago, marking the apex of what was already an early and severe outbreak. However, such an outlook requires observers to ignore that outpatient doctor visits have continued to climb (albeit more slowly) in the first week of 2018, yielding the most flu cases ever for this time of the year.

Even if the hopeful assessment by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bears out, there will still be an additional 11 weeks to 13 weeks of flu circulating across the country. “In general, we see things peaking right about now, but that means there is still a whole lot more flu to go,” Jernigan said. “In addition, there are other strains of influenza still to show up that could be a major cause of disease.” (Read more from “Think Flu Season Is Bad? It Might Get Even Worse” HERE)

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Pet Owners Warned of Dog Flu

By CBS Local. Some people are worried about their pets getting the flu because so many people are infected.

There is canine influenza, more commonly known as the dog flu, and the symptoms are similar to what humans get. But it’s not the same virus.

The flu is now widespread across the country and so are respiratory infections and colds . . .

Veterinarians say canine influenza mainly affects dogs and the signs are much like what you see in people. (Read more from “Pet Owners Warned of Dog Flu” HERE)

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21-Year-Old Bodybuilder Dies Just Days After Flu Diagnosis

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By Jackie Salo. A 21-year-old bodybuilder’s family says they were shocked when the healthy, young man died within days of being diagnosed with the flu.

Kyler Baughman’s relatives are warning others about the dangers of influenza after he died of complications from the virus last week at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania, WXPI reported . . .

It first became apparent Kyler was sick when he returned home from work with a mild cough.

Within 48 hours, his health began rapidly declining, according to his family . . .

He was rushed Wednesday to a Westmoreland County emergency room and airlifted to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he died just hours later. (Read more from “21-Year-Old Bodybuilder Dies Just Days After Flu Diagnosis” HERE)

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California Girl, 12, Dies From Infection Misdiagnosed as Flu, Family Says

By Jennifer Earl. When Alyssa Alcarez was sent home from school after throwing up, her family thought she probably had a “bug” of some sort – maybe even a mild case of the flu.

The next day, Alcarez’s mother, Keila Lino, decided to take her daughter to a nearby urgent care, where doctors confirmed her suspicion: Alcarez had the flu . . .

When medication, rest and fluids failed, Lino rushed her daughter to urgent care. A physician told Lino the seventh grader’s oxygen levels were low, and Alcarez was rushed to Kaweah Delta Medical Center in Visalia, California . . .

The 12-year-old went into cardiac arrest, which, her parents say, was a result of septic shock from a strep infection in her blood – an infection she had no idea her daughter was suffering from. Within hours, Alcarez was dead . . .

The flu is now widespread in 46 states, according to the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). California is being hit particularly hard. State health officials say at least 27 people younger than 65 have died of the flu in the state since October. (Read more from “California Girl, 12, Dies From Infection Misdiagnosed as Flu, Family Says” HERE)

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Flu Widespread in 36 States

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Outbreaks of influenza are getting an early start this year in part because of cold weather gripping much of the USA and low efficacy associated with this year’s flu vaccine.

It’s still too early to say whether this winter will be a bad season for the flu, but epidemiologists in 36 states already have reported widespread influenza activity to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in data released Friday. Twenty-one of those states show a high number of cases.

“It’s just one of those years where the CDC is seeing that this strain of flu is only somewhat covered by the vaccine that was given this year,” said Jennifer Radtke, manager for infection prevention at the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. “They’re seeing that it’s anywhere from 10% to 33% effective, so any time there’s a mismatch between the vaccine and the circulating strain of the flu, you’re going to see more cases.” . . .

Vaccine effectiveness varies from year to year though recent studies show that a flu shot typically reduces the risk of illness by 40% to 60% among the overall population when the circulating virus is matched closely to the vaccine virus, according to the CDC.

Because only a certain percentage of people with flu symptoms go to hospitals and get tested, it can be challenging to track the actual number of people affected, Radtke said. False negative results for flu tests are also common, so it’s likely the number of people with the flu is much higher. (Read more from “Flu Widespread in 36 States” HERE)

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America Faces One of the Worst Flu Seasons Ever

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America is set to endure one of the most perilous flu seasons in years – with doctors warning it could be similar to the deadly 2014 outbreak.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US will be hit by a particular strain of influenza called H3N2, the same strain which has just wreaked havoc in Australia, and was responsible for the four most deadly flu seasons in the last 10 years.

Early assessments suggest the current vaccine – which was produced in spring after scientists made an educated guess at what strain to expect – will be just 10 percent effective.

While some seasons don’t kick off until February, we are already seeing a surge in people hospitalized with influenza-like symptoms – at a rate even faster and earlier than we saw in 2014.

‘I’m anticipating this being a bad flu year,’ infectious diseases specialist Dr Pritish Tosh, of the Mayo Clinic, told Daily Mail Online. (Read more from “America Faces One of the Worst Flu Seasons Ever” HERE)

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Scientists Have Revealed Where the Flu Develops, Study Shows How It Spreads

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CoughResearchers have found that flu develops in the roof of the mouth – and that it is spread through coughs and sneezes.

The key area of where flu develops is located in the soft palate separating the back of the mouth and the nasal cavity, according to new research.

Scientists have found that the inflammation associated with infection in the soft palate stimulates the sneezing and coughing, with it propelling the flu virus out of the mouth enabling it to spread easily.

Dr Kanta Subbarao, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in the US said: “Historically, the soft palate has not been examined in animal models of influenza.”

Published in the science journal Nature, the research was carried out on ferrets whose mouths are similar to humans. (Read more from “Scientists Have Revealed Where the Flu Develops, Study Shows How It Spreads” HERE)

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