Influenza

Howard County health officials are offering up to 4,000 free flu inoculations next month at a drive-through clinic designed to reach twice as many people as a similar exercise last year. The shots, which will be given from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Nov. 4 at Columbia's Gateway Business Park, are available to anyone, not just county residents, said Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the county's health officer. No Flu-Mist spray will be used, said Beilenson, who announced the program yesterday. The county plans to field 230 employees and volunteers, including police, firefighters and health officials in what will double as an emergency-preparedness exercise.

Manufacturers are on track to produce and ship more flu vaccine than ever before, averting the fears of a shortage that have marked recent flu seasons, federal health authorities said yesterday. With the supply virtually assured, officials of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged all Americans who want flu vaccinations to get them. In particular, they recommend innoculation for infants over 6 months of age, pregnant women, adults with asthma, heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, as well as all adults 50 and older.

Six bodies unearthed last year in the Norwegian Arctic have unexpectedly yielded a scientific prize: They hold part of the virus that caused the Spanish influenza of 1918, which killed at least 40 million people in one of the worst disease outbreaks in history.Researchers at a scientific meeting in London said this week that they have identified fragments of the long-sought virus in the brains and organs of six young men who died in October 1918 on Svalbard, an island less than 800 miles from the North Pole.

One minute you feel fine; the next, your head throbs and your muscles and joints ache. You feel hot, then cold. Weak and dazed, you can only burrow in bed and cough and sneeze and sniffle for the 10 days it takes for the virus to run its course.Influenza strikes fast and hits hard.After it does, there's little any doctor can do to help. That is, until now.Last month marked the debut of a new prescription drug called Relenza. Relenza has been shown to shorten the duration of the flu by an average of 1 1/2 days.

Scientists have fully identified the genetic makeup of the lethal bird flu virus that killed six people in Hong Kong and warn that the outbreak may be a harbinger of a "fowl plague."In two reports that will appear in the British medical journal Lancet, researchers describe not just the arrangement of molecules that compose the virus but the flu's startling clinical features that make it unlike any other form of influenza in recent memory.The good news, say scientists at the World Health Organization's Influenza Centre at Erasmus University in the Netherlands, is that tests now confirm the virus was not transmitted human-to-human.

HONG KONG -- A yellow sign stenciled with interlocking black rings and a single word hangs over Kennedy F. Shortridge's laboratory. That word is "Biohazard.""In here," Shortridge said, opening the chrome door of an incubator, "we will grow the virus."Dozens of scientists around the world, principally in Hong Kong and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, are working feverishly to understand the new flu virus that has spread from chickens to humans here, so far killing two.The flu, called H5N1, is a previously unknown strain of influenza virus that has jumped directly from chickens to humans, a leap that apparently had not occurred in previous flu outbreaks.

My pediatrician gives our son a flu shot every fall, . but this year he has been sick already. I know the flu vaccine is made new each year. Is it just not good this year?"

The county Department of Health has scheduled flu shot clinics this week and next for county residents.Pneumococcal vaccine also will be available at all clinic locations.Among those who should consider receiving influenza vaccine are people older than 65; with chronic heart and lung disease, including cystic fibrosis and asthma, kidney disease, diabetes, or hemoglobin disorders; and cancer or AIDS patients. If you are not sure if you should receive the influenza vaccine, contact your physician.

Health workers moved swiftly last week to bottle up the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Zaire. But students of epidemics warn: Wait for the virus next time.As farmers clear jungles, as tourists trek into exotic locales, as airlines and highways stitch continents more snugly together -- microbes quarantined by nature for millions of years threaten to spill across the globe.Ebola was one.But dozens of others have appeared in the past 30 years, including the microorganisms that cause AIDS, Lassa fever, Lyme disease, Legionaire's disease, Rift Valley fever, Brazilian purpuric fever, Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever and hanta virus pulmonary syndrome.

Does it seem that half the people around you are sniffling, sneezing, wheezing, coughing and generally feeling like heck right about now?Two weeks ago, 1,680 medical workers around the country reported that roughly 126,880,000 people -- about half the population -- had cold and flu symptoms as of Jan. 7, according to a survey by the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical company.Although that's a lot of ailing folks, doctors say it is the time of year for colds."I am seeing a lot of people with respiratory infections of one kind or another," says Dr. James Richardson, who practices family medicine at the University of Maryland Medical System.

Once the H1N1 influenza outbreaks begin - and Maryland health officials have no doubt that they will - this series of nondescript scientific laboratories, located past security guards instructed not to let anyone in without an official escort, will certainly be humming. Here, inside the state office complex on Preston Street in Baltimore, dozens if not hundreds of polyester swabs will arrive each week, containing what doctors believe is evidence of swine flu's resurgence. Lab workers will then determine whether it is the flu - H1N1 or seasonal, or something else entirely - and whether the virus seems to be gaining strength.

The flu is usually gone by now. Dr. Ann Morrill isn't generally prescribing Tamiflu and bed rest in July to her Perry Hall patients. The emergency department at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson doesn't typically do a dozen flu tests a day this deep into summer. But the H1N1 influenza virus - commonly called swine flu - continues to spread in Maryland and many other states, even though some experts thought it would have faded away by now across the country. During the last week of June, the state confirmed 166 new cases - the highest weekly total since the first cases were confirmed here May 4. And officials believe that for every confirmed case, there are many more that go unconfirmed as the sick either don't seek medical treatment or are refused testing.

The H1N1 flu epidemic is not over. It is just the end of its beginning. This virus continues to sicken (and even kill) people in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. We will begin to see its broader impact here and elsewhere - particularly in the Southern Hemisphere - this summer. And the most important part of this story, at least the U.S. version of it, will come with the return of the fall flu season, when we return to conditions conducive to the spread of influenza. While H1N1 is no longer as prominent a story in the press, the numbers of those ill and hospitalized continues to rise.

The 2008-2009 influenza season is not quite over, but Maryland health officials say it appears to have peaked and the number of new cases is on the wane. "We expect lower levels of flu throughout the rest of the month of April, but it should finally be over by the beginning of May," said Rene Najera, an epidemiologist with the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. This flu season has been milder than last year's, Najera said, and he credits the design of this year's vaccine. "The vaccine strains were a better match" for the viruses actually circulating for most of this season, he said.

The flu strain most likely to make you sick this winter has developed a near-total resistance to one of the most popular drugs prescribed to blunt its symptoms. More than 98 percent of one of the influenza A viruses circulating this winter is now resistant to the antiviral drug Tamiflu, up from less than 1 percent just two years ago, according to a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Scientists say the increased resistance appears to be the result of a natural mutation, not over-prescription of the 10-year-old drug.

Baltimore health officials declare influenza alert With the number of positive influenza tests rising sharply in the city, Baltimore health officials declared a flu alert yesterday. "We're really seeing sustained transmission of flu in Baltimore. Now is the time to protect yourself," said the city's health commissioner, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein. Sentinel hospitals reported that 12 percent of flu tests last week came back positive, more than twice the rate for the previous week. There have been no deaths, but the Johns Hopkins Children's Center is treating a teenager who is critically ill with flu. "This is not just the sniffles.

"Tired, beleaguered and battered" is how Dr. David del Rosario described himself yesterday as he hustled to care for the rising tide of patients streaming into his Patient First clinic in Glen Burnie with symptoms of the flu. "We started seeing the trickle in mid-January," he said, "and literally by the first week of February, that's when the tsunami hit." Since then, del Rosario's life has been a blur of 10-hour days in a succession of Patient First sites in suburban Maryland and a parade of patient misery.

Researchers are reporting preliminary success with a vaccine against a possible "bird flu" pandemic, using a process they say could deliver the product in half the time required by older technology. The milestone, experts said, also offers hope for speedier production of a vaccine against seasonal flu, potentially eliminating contamination problems and shortages that have cropped up in recent years. Reporting today in a leading medical journal, scientists with Baxter International Inc. said their avian flu vaccine - which dispenses with the cumbersome process of growing vaccine in chicken eggs - was safe and triggered an immune response.

Manufacturers are on track to produce and ship more flu vaccine than ever before, averting the fears of a shortage that have marked recent flu seasons, federal health authorities said yesterday. With the supply virtually assured, officials of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged all Americans who want flu vaccinations to get them. In particular, they recommend innoculation for infants over 6 months of age, pregnant women, adults with asthma, heart disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses, as well as all adults 50 and older.

Howard County health officials are offering up to 4,000 free flu inoculations next month at a drive-through clinic designed to reach twice as many people as a similar exercise last year. The shots, which will be given from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Nov. 4 at Columbia's Gateway Business Park, are available to anyone, not just county residents, said Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, the county's health officer. No Flu-Mist spray will be used, said Beilenson, who announced the program yesterday. The county plans to field 230 employees and volunteers, including police, firefighters and health officials in what will double as an emergency-preparedness exercise.