(Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:41:17 -0500)
A day or two after CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) released a report about risks to pregnant women from pandemic 2009 flu, CDC held a suddenly announced press briefing about the current H1N1 situation (I listened in but a transcript should be up on the site by the time you read this; check this page). The occasion for the briefing was a worrisome increase in hospitalizations and deaths in CDC’s Georgia backyard. Despite housing CDC, Georgia has one of the lower flu vaccination rates in the country and now is experiencing an unexpected recrudescence of H1N1 flu, with numbers of hospitalizations not seen in the state since the height of the pandemic last October. The cases were described as “adults,” many with pre-existing medical conditions, with a geographic distribution that, on a preliminary view, might be hitting areas less hard hit than the fall wave of cases. Since late February, Georgia was seeing more hospitalizations (in numbers) than any other state in the union and the reason isn’t known. What we know so far is that it is the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, laboratory confirmed and said not to be different than before. What that is based on we don’t know. It is not either of the previous seasonal flu strains, seasonal H1N1 or seasonal H3N2, nor influenza B, which is circulating at many locations at very low levels.
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