April M. Short is a freelance writer who focuses on health, wellness and social justice. She previously worked as AlterNet's drugs and health editor.
This flu season is turning out to be so intense that the number of people seeking care at doctors' offices and emergency rooms has
surged to levels not reported since the peak of the 2009 swine flu pandemic, federal officials said Friday.
“This does not mean we’re having a pandemic,” Schuchat said. “But it is a signal of how very intense the flu season has been. We may be on track to break some recent records.”
Pandemics occur when there is a new strain of virus for which people have no previous exposure. That's not the case here, because the seasonal strains that are circulating this year are not new. But the predominant one, H3N2, is a particularly nasty strain that is associated with more complications, hospitalizations and deaths, especially among children, those older than 65 and people with certain chronic conditions.
Another 10 children died in the week ending Feb. 2, bringing the total number of child deaths since this flu season began to at least 63. This is the number of reported deaths and probably does not include all children who have died. States are not required to report adult flu deaths.
Flu activity is still widespread across the country, the latest data show. Overall
hospitalizations are also now significantly higher than what officials have normally seen this time of year since CDC began using this tracking system in 2010, Schuchat said. In particular, officials are seeing unusually high levels of hospitalizations in non-elderly adults, with the rates for 50-to-64-year-olds significantly higher than what they were at the same period in the severe 2014-2015 season with the same predominant flu strain.
The
latest weekly report shows 1 out of every 13 doctor visits last week was for fever, cough and other symptoms of the flu, matching the peak levels during the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It was higher than any other seasonal flu season since 2003, when officials changed the way flu is tracked.
“We don’t have any signs of hospitalizations leveling off yet,” Schuchat said in a telephone briefing for reporters.
In an interview with Politico’s “Women Rule” podcast, the Arizona Republican’s daughter said her father, recovering from chemotherapy for aggressive brain cancer and a viral infection in December, is taking precautions that are keeping him in Arizona.
While the H3N2 strain, a type of influenza A virus, continues to dominate, officials are now also seeing increases in the proportion of influenza B viruses in this 11th week of the flu season.
One reason for this unusually intense flu season is probably the vaccine’s lower effectiveness against the predominant strain. Canadian researchers recently suggested the H3N2 component of the vaccine is about 17 percent effective in preventing infection.
“I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that” for the vaccine’s effectiveness against the H3N2 in the United States, Schuchat said. But she and others have said the vaccine performs better against other strains, and is about 55 percent effective against influenza B viruses that are on the rise. Flu shots also reduce the severity of illness. CDC is expected to soon release a preliminary analysis of this season’s vaccine effectiveness.
Officials say it is not too late to get a flu shot. They don’t know how long this season will last — it has yet to reach its peak — and it is possible to get infected by flu more than once.
Angie Barwise, a 58-year-old mother and grandmother from Fort Worth, was diagnosed with the flu twice this season and died last week following complications from the illness. She had been diagnosed around the holidays with the flu, along with bronchitis and strep, her family told
Fox affiliate KDFW. Her family said she had not received the vaccine.
Doctors gave her antibiotics and the antiviral medication Tamiflu, and she started to bounce back. But almost exactly a month later, her family said, she was in the emergency room with a different strain of the virus. But this time, KDFW reported, Barwise also had pneumonia and went into in septic shock, a life-threatening medical condition and a known complication of the virus, according to CDC.
On Saturday — a week after her second bout of the flu began — she died.
“I've outlived my own daughter,” her mother, Eileen Smith, told the news station this week. “I'm 83 years old, and I've outlived her. It shouldn't be that way.”
As health-care professionals scramble to combat the virus and care for people seeking treatment, there continue to be local shortages of antiviral medication, officials said. Unlike most years when flu activity starts and ends at different times and at different places across the country, virtually the entire country has been slammed with intense levels of flu at the same time, so there are more prescriptions for antiviral drugs than previous years, Schuchat said.
CDC officials are working with pharmacies, health plans and others in the health-care system to have pharmacies stock larger amounts of medicine and allow brand-name drugs to be substituted for generics, which often carry lower out-of-pocket costs for consumers.
Still, the cost of prescription antivirals has led some patients to hesitate using them, with tragic consequences.
Heather Holland, a schoolteacher from Willow Park, Tex., was recently diagnosed with the flu and prescribed the generic form of Tamiflu. But her husband, Frank,
told the Wall Street Journal that once she discovered it cost her $116 under her insurance plan, she decided against it.
“It’s principle with her. She’s a very frugal person in general, always has been,” he said.
Frank Holland told the Journal that when he found out that his wife had refused to fill the prescription, he did it. “I made her start taking it,” he told the newspaper.
But Holland was not able to fight the flu — her family said she died Feb. 4, less than a week after she first started to experience symptoms of the virus.
Read more:
Lena H. Sun is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on health.
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Lindsey Bever is a general assignment reporter for The Washington Post, covering national news with an emphasis on health.
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As thousands marched in the streets of London recently to protest funding cuts to the British National Health Service, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to criticize the idea of universal health care.
"The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!"
See Figure 1 on PolitiFact.com
Trump’s Feb. 5 tweet came shortly after Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader, talked about the NHS march and universal health care on Fox & Friends, warning Americans it would be "politically impossible" to remove such a system once introduced. Trump thanked the network on
Twitter for "exposing the truth" shortly after Farage’s appearance.
We wondered how accurate Trump’s claim was that people joined the NHS march because the UK’s universal health care system "is going broke and not working."
We looked at the origins of the march and recent polling statistics about British public opinion on the National Health Service, commonly called the NHS. We also looked at the current funding situation, since Trump’s claim suggests it’s losing money. We found that Trump’s tweet gives a misleading impression about how the British public feels about its health care system.
Public support for NHS
University of North Carolina health policy professor and deputy director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, Thomas C. Ricketts, told PolitiFact that the NHS probably has higher public support than any other government program in the UK.
Public support for the NHS being maintained in its current form remains high according to a poll by
Ipsos; 77 percent of people support this, while 9 in 10 people think the founding principles of the NHS should still apply to services today. Two-thirds of adults are willing to pay more of their own taxes to pay for the NHS.
In a poll by
YouGov last year, 84 percent of people were in favor of the service continuing to be run by the public sector.
Helen Howson, the director of the Bevan Commission, an independent think tank for health in Wales, is working to find ways to improve the system while maintaining the principles set out at its founding.
"The NHS is a service which was set up to ensure that no one would be disadvantaged on the basis of their ability to pay, and people are passionate about these principles," she said.
This year marks 70 years of NHS existence in the U.K., but the health care system has gone through what has been described as the
worst winter in its recent history. The lack of funding is often blamed on austerity measures put forth by the Conservative Party and there have been concerns raised over
privatizing parts of the system.
Trump’s comments regarding the demonstration received immediate response by British officials, such as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who
said people were marching because they love the NHS and hate what is being happening to it by the current party in power.
Health minister Jeremy Hunt, who was largely
blamed for the severe lack of winter funding, hit back at Trump’s remarks,
writing on Twitter that not one of the marchers "wants to live in a system where 28m people have no cover."
Growing concerns
This is not to say that people don’t have concerns about the NHS. In a
poll released last summer by the British Medical Association, more people are unhappy with the NHS than satisfied for the first time in the public poll run by British doctors. It showed that 70 percent of people think the health service is going in the wrong direction.
The poll shows that 43 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with the service, which is double the number of dissatisfaction percentage in only two years. About 33 percent of respondents say they are satisfied. The poll also concluded that 82 percent of people are worried about the future of the NHS, 62 percent expect the NHS to get worse in the coming years and only 13 percent think that it will improve.
The leading concerns of the respondents included a lack of funding, the possibility that the NHS may cease to be free at the point of use, increased waiting times and a lack of attention given to the service because of Brexit.
Democrats’ push
Trump also claimed that Democrats are pushing a similar health care plan to the NHS in the United States. Democrats have devised plans ranging from a total-government "Medicare for all," also known as a single-payer health system, to a more limited "public option" that pits individual government-run plans up against private insurance for people who weren’t able to find affordable coverage in Obamacare. The latter allows Americans to gain access to government insurance alongside private health care plans.
The current version of Obamacare, more formally known as the Affordable Care Act, has little resemblance to the NHS, where the government owns most of the hospitals and clinics, and doctors and nurses are government employees.
Our ruling
Trump said, "The Democrats are pushing for Universal HealthCare while thousands of people are marching in the UK because their U system is going broke and not working. Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks!"
While the NHS has lost funding over the years, the march that took place was not in opposition to the service, but a call to increase funding and stop austerity cuts towards health and social care. The march resulted because people want universal health care to work better, not because they want it taken over by the private sector.
We rate this Mostly False.
Published: Thursday, February 8th, 2018 at 11:00 a.m.
Twitter, @realDonaldTrump
tweet, Feb 5, 2018
Twitter, @realDonaldTrump
tweet, Feb 5, 2018
Twitter, @jeremycorbyn
tweet, Feb 5, 2018
Twitter, @Jeremy_Hunt
tweet, Feb 5, 2018
Interview with Thomas C. Ricketts, University of North Carolina health policy professor and deputy director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, February 6, 2018
Interview with Ian Shaw, Professor of health policy at the University of Nottingham, February 6, 2018
Interview with Christopher Newdick, professor of Health Law at the University of Reading. February 7, 2018
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