Young Kids Are Getting The Best Protection From Current Flu Vaccine

The organization then meets to recommend countries on which specific vaccine for the viruses then each country makes the decision on which viruses should be included in the influenza vaccine, according to CDC website.

Lopez said there are only estimations on flu mortalities since it isn’t mandatory to report flu-related deaths.

“This is a severe flu season, and unfortunately there are no signs that it has peaked yet”, said State Health Commissioner Kris Box, MD, FACOG.

She said that despite never having the flu, the symptoms were worse than she ever expected. People must get a new vaccine every year to be protected. “It is modestly effective”, said Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology at the University of MI and a co-author of the report. The CDC advises that people who are very sick or who are at high risk for serious flu complications should get antiviral medications as soon as flu symptoms appear.

Most did not even have flu – just 38 percent of them tested positive for flu.

“Usually the vaccine in and of itself gives you maybe a mild, flu-like syndrome, which is your body fighting and making those protective immune responses to the vaccine itself”.

This “indicates that vaccination provided some protection, in contrast to recently reported, nonsignificant interim estimates of 17 per cent from Canada and 10 per cent from Australia”, said the report.

Based on these numbers, the answer is yes.

In any case, this year does not appear to be the worst recent year for overall vaccine effectiveness.

The good news in New York: Hospitalizations declined 3 percent last week, according to data from the State Health Department, but that improvement was offset by the number of lab-confirmed cases, which jumped by 7 percent to 16,804, the highest weekly figure in that category since reporting began in 2004.

Adults who get a flu shot are 36% less likely to get the disease, while the figure for children was an unexpectedly high 59%, USA health officials said on Thursday. However, because of the severity of this season, there have been questions raised about how well this year’s flu vaccine worked.

The flu has killed at least 66 people in Georgia this year.

Now, vaccine efficacy is not easy to predict; after all, vaccines are created to protect against one strain of a particular virus. Milton, in an email, called this wrong and said his study didn’t examine vaccine effectiveness.

“The fact that the vaccine doesn’t work as well as we would like is clearly a contributing factor”, said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert.

CDC officials said there is room for improvement to the vaccine.