A look back at flu season
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a teleconference on Thursday to talk about the flu season just past and to announce an important change in flu-shot recommendations. (Transcript here; New York Times article here.)
The 2007-08 season was worse than the preceding three seasons, the article said. The main reason was that the most virulent strain of flu virus wasn't exactly one of the ones covered by the flu vaccine, although the kind covered by the vaccine covered a slight variant.
It's important for the vaccine to be a good match for the predominant strains of flu virus. But they're sometimes difficult to match up because manufacturing vaccines must begin months before they will be needed -- time during which a totally new strain or variant of virus can emerge.
Here's the change: Up 'til now, the CDC has recommended that children between the ages of 5 and 18 be vaccinated only if they had high-risk medical conditions or if they lived in households in which it would be possible for them to infect someone with a high-risk medical condition. For 2008-09 if possible, and by 2009-10 for sure, the CDC is calling for all children between 5 and 18 to be vaccinated -- that's 30 million additional people.
Flu-shot manufacturers manufactured roughly 140 million doses of flu vaccine this past season. The CDC expects the supply to be greater next fall, although it won't know how much greater for about another month.
Remember the stakes: About 200,000 people get the flu in the U.S. every year, the CDC says, and about 36,000 people die of it.