In yesterday’s CDC press briefing, Ann Schuchat, Director of CDC’s National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases, gave a post-holiday roundup of the latest H1N1 developments.
Here’s the short course: The vaccine is now available to pretty much everyone who wants it all across the country. So far, the US hasn’t decided to return/donate/sell any of its vaccine supply as some European countries are doing. Instead, it’s focusing on the upcoming (10-16 January) National Influenza Vaccine Week (NIVW). NIVW is another big push to encourage Americans to get H1N1 and seasonal-flu shots. It has its own schedule of activities, informational materials, a media toolkit, and web tools like ecards and badges.
Why continue pushing the H1N1 vaccine when, as Schuchat announced, “we’re seeing drops in laboratory confirmed hospitalizations and deaths”? Because there’s also “activity increasing in a few other indicators.” She clarified:
We still have more activity than we usually have this time of year, though it’s certainly much below where it was several weeks ago. All the virus that we’re seeing right now is the H1N1 virus. We haven’t yet seen the emergence of seasonal flu strains in any numbers at all. We saw a slight uptick in the last week’s reporting in the influenza-like illness visits to the doctors or emergency departments. That can sometimes happen right around Christmas, so we don’t know if that will persist. We also saw an uptick in pneumonia or influenza deaths in this past week. And that isn’t something that we necessarily see around the Christmas holiday.
Minnesota was one state that reported increased influenza-like illness last week.
What CDC is afraid of, of course, is a third wave of H1N1. To drive the point home, Schuchat showed this graph of pandemic mortality in 1957:
[CDC / usable on your site]
She went on to say:
This is really a reminder of why we are saying that we need to remain vigilant. [...] [I]f you look at this graph, the bottom part of that curve, you know, the — there’s the camel hump and then it comes down to that valley. Well, that’s where we are right now in that valley. We don’t know what’s going to happen over the next several weeks or months. But in 1957, this essentially gave the all clear whistle in that December/January time period. They had vaccine, but they didn’t encourage its use and yet they did go on to see that increase in mortality.
National Influenza Vaccine Week launches on Sunday. You can check here for NIVW activities in your area.
