Flu Bug On The Job Too Soon State’s Influenza Tracker Didn’t Beat The Virus

This year’s flu bug is a mighty efficient, Type-A little virus.

For starters, it’s on the job two months early.

“Historically, our influenza season is January through March, with the peak activity the last week of January and the first week of February. Sometimes, for unknown reasons, we have an early or late season,” wrote Washington State Influenza Coordinator Phyllis Shoemaker in a memo to doctors and health departments across the state.

She wanted to have the memo out sooner than when she wrote it last week, but she was home with the flu.

She had planned to get her flu shot last week, figuring that it would take two weeks to mobilize her body’s defense systems against the virus she expected to encounter in January. Instead, she was holed up in her Seattle office with her door closed at her colleagues’ request - tracking the bug that had caught her.

In the first half of the month she had followed the virus to Clark County, where seven elementary schools reported one fourth of their kids were absent between Nov. 1 and Nov. 13. In Grays Harbor, 34 percent of the kids in one school were out sick. In King County, the Mobile X-Ray Unit that screens nursing home patients found that the pneumonia that often follows influenza was more prevalent than normal.

Shoemaker has seen that Grays Harbor spike before. A few years back, a flu that popped up in Alaska hitched a ride to the lower 48 on the Grays Harbor fishing fleet. The fishermen came home, got sick, sneezed on their families and got the bugs started in the schools and stores and offices.

As viruses go, influenza is a breezy creature. Generally, it starts out in China and writes its own ticket around the world. It glides on sneezes, huddles in crumpled tissues, basks on doorknobs and lurks in phone mouthpieces.

Tap out Type 3 A, or Type 1 A, on a keyboard full of flu germs, then raise your hand to your mouth as you yawn, and BINGO! you’ve redefined the term “computer virus.”

Health officials don’t know yet exactly which variation on the bug is making people sick so soon. But they’re working on it.

They’re collecting throat cultures from a few of the people who have come down with classic flu symptoms: sore throat, headache, fever, chills, muscle aches and a nasty cough.

The miserable souls whose tests come up positive turn up on the state’s register of confirmed cases, which so far is under 20.

The state isn’t trying to count the number of flu victims, Shoemaker said. It’s trying to figure out what kind of flu they have.

Doctors don’t need an expensive test to know that a person with classic flu symptoms needs rest, lots of liquids, medicines that will soothe the sore throat, cough and headache.

Those doctors do need to know the structure of the bug of the moment. The test will show them - though it hasn’t yet - if it’s one of the strains this year’s vaccine will fight.

If it is, people can still be protected if they get a shot in time. People who are allergic to eggs - and the albumen that is part of the vaccine - can also benefit from the quick ID if it’s a Type A strain.