Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Upset stomachs, coughing, vomiting, fevers – Sweet Home has had its share in recent weeks.
A spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says she and her colleagues think this busy flu season has reached its peak, and the number of students and staff missing school in Sweet Home last week was lower last week than the week before.
Still, School District 55 officials think the flu has hit the district and community unusually hard this year, in keeping with a nationwide trend.
“We’ve had a high percentage of students and staff absent over the last week or two,” District 55 Supt. Larry Horton said Thursday. “It appears as though it’s a cross between the flu and a cold. Some people have cold symptoms. Some have flu symptoms, and some have both.
“It seems as though it’s starting to get better. This week was better than last. We have turned the corner, I think it’s safe to say.”
The district had 315 students out of 2,053 absent on Feb. 11. The next day, it had 159 absent, but on Feb. 19, 253 were absent.
On Feb. 12, 45 staff members, approximately 13 percent, were absent, and the subs were sick too, with only 69 percent of positions filled.
“There’s been a lot of things going around the state,” said Tammy McCoy, Linn County Health Department nursing supervisor. The flu vaccines this year were partially effective.
The most important things to remember are to wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough and stay home if you’re sick, McCoy said.
After two or three mild flu season, this year’s flu season started out relatively low, said Dr. Joe Bresee, branch chief of the Branch of Epidemiology and Prevention with the CDC Influenza Division, during a media update given in a nationwide conference call on Feb. 14. The number of states reporting widespread influenza activity increased from 31 to 44 the week of Feb. 7, and 10 children had died nationwide.
Two weeks ago, according to Dr. Nancy Cox, director of the CDC Influenza Division, 49 states were reporting widespread activity in the most recent figures available, and Florida was reporting regional activity. The death toll increased to 22.
Stepping back from a three-year look at influenza activity to a 10-year perspective, Cox said, “what you would see is that we really are within the normal parameters of what we would expect for an influenza season.”
The flu season started with a mild strain predominant, but that changed to an apparently more severe strain, Bresee said. Those kinds of changes can affect how well a vaccine works, he said.
Ideally, a group of people who are vaccinated are exposed to strains that match the vaccination, Bresee said.
“In those years, we’d expect somewhere between 70 and 90 percent protection against influenza-specific disease, and so if you think about that as a benchmark, what we find is that each year the effectiveness of the vaccine actually varies a bit, and it varies for multiple reasons.”
“When the vaccine virus doesn’t match perfectly against the circulating strains, we do see some effectiveness, though it’s not 70-90 percent. Slightly more than half of the viruses that we are looking at in our lab are viruses that are somewhat different than the vaccine strains. So it may not be well-covered by the vaccine strains.
“Even in those years where the vaccine matches less well against circulating strains, we know that getting vaccinated will tend to make the illnesses milder, lessen the chances a person has a very severe outcome.”
“It looks like it may be leveling off a bit, but it’s difficult to know,” Cox said. “Our index of influenza-like illness increased in six of the nine regions compared to last week and actually was above the region-specific baselines in all of our nine regions.
“So I think that what we can say is that influenza activity has continued to increase, but not quite as dramatically as the increases that we had seen over the previous two weeks.
“We really can’t predict the severity or the duration of influenza season. But looking at the data, it does suggest that we may be nearing the peak within the next few weeks.”