Worst flu season in a decade: provincial health officer

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VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Feeling a little under the weather?

It’s shaping up to be one of the worst flu seasons in recent memory in British Columbia.

“We’ve had quite a large number of long-term care outbreaks and a smaller number of acute care outbreaks in just about every region of the province except for the north. So we’ve got an active flu season going on, looking like close to a ten-year high as we look at influenza visits to physicians’ offices,” says province’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Perry Kendall.

The spike is due in part to a less than effective vaccine for the H3N2 strain.

“There has been a drift in the strain that is circulating from the vaccine strain. So the H3N2 component to the influenza vaccine, we think it’s going to be less effective than we would have liked. So it’s not giving optimal protection. We’re not protecting at the level of 70 to 80 per cent, we’re likely protecting at less than 50 per cent.”

Kendall says we’ve likely seen the worst of it and expects the number of cases to drop for the rest of the winter.

“There’s seasonality to influenza. We tend to start seeing cases in October and then they peak in December and January. We get the influenza A viruses earlier on in the season and then what we tend to see is the B viruses, which tend to affect younger people and aren’t quite as serious, we tend to see those coming in towards the end of the season in February or March. So we usually think the flu season being over in March or April.”

 

 

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