W.Va. seeing an early arrival of the flu season
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CHARLESTON, W.Va. – West Virginia public health officials said one strain of influenza is making an early appearance in the state.
As a result, the number of people seeking medical care for flu-like symptoms at West Virginia medical facilities is on the rise.
“Essentially, we’re seeing levels of flu activity that are similar to what we saw during the 2009 flu pandemic,” according to Shannon McBee, an epidemiologist and the influenza coordinator for the West Virginia Bureau for Public health.
“The flu season has started about six to eight weeks earlier than we normally see in West Virginia – cases here don’t ordinarily peak until late January or early February, so we’re running a little earlier,” she told the Charleston Gazette.
McBee said reports of the flu strain A-H3N2 rose across the state in the past week. Although the outbreaks were appearing predominantly in the northern part of the state and the Eastern Panhandle in recent weeks, southern West Virginia and the Kanawha Valley saw an increased number of cases of the flu in the past few weeks.
“It isn’t helping things,” McBee said, “because seasons that are predominated by H3N2 tend to produce harsher symptoms and higher mortality, especially in older people or younger children.”
The problems with the H3N2 strain are compounded by the fact that the virus seems to have become more resistant to the flu vaccination, she said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier this month flu cases were widespread in 29 states. If the trend continues, it could bring another early peak to the flu season as happened in the last two winters.
Experts worry this will be a bad season because the dominant strain – seen in roughly two-thirds of recent tests – is a nasty bug not covered in this year’s vaccine. But officials have not seen an unusually high number of hospitalizations or deaths so far.
Flu season traditionally peaks around February. But in the last two winters, flu peaked by early January.
Janet Briscoe, epidemiology coordinator for the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, said she would not characterize the disease as widespread in the region yet, although she said there was an increase in flu cases for the county.