Seasonal influenza is hitting North America hard owing to a lack of exposure and dominance of the virulent strain H3N2.
Credit: Aleksandra Suzi/Shutterstock
Clinicians and parents in Canada are watching with concern as paediatric hospitalizations for seasonal influenza climb — at present, they are at more than ten times the normal rate for this time of year. In late November, weekly admissions were 50% higher than at the record peak for at least the past seven flu seasons .
“The younger age group is being hit unusually hard for this time of year,” says Alyson Kelvin, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. Unusually, flu-based hospitalizations are currently higher for children aged 0–4 years than for people aged over 65.“It’s concerning to see this many hospitalizations,” says Kelvin.
There are several possible reasons for the spike in flu numbers. Some cases could be due to an ‘immunity deficit’ in the population resulting from a lack of exposure to seasonal influenza during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Robert Ware, a clinical epidemiologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. And the dominant subtype this year, influenza A subtype H3N2, is known to cause more severe illness than do other common strains.
It is not clear whether the number of flu cases in North America will continue to climb throughout December and January, creating a larger than usual disease burden, or whether a rapid increase early in the season will mean that the epidemic starts to decline earlier than usual.Seasonal flu typically kills about 389,000 people globally each year, and its impact is most severe in people over 65 years of age, followed by very young children and people who are immunocompromised.
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