Three-fourths of those with symptoms say the were not vaccinated 41 states have reported cases
The U.S. has been hit with a particularly aggressive early flu season this year with widespread reports of the illness across the country, hospitalizing 2,257 people and leaving 18 children dead before the end of 2012.
And health officials say the numbers haven't even peaked yet.
'I think we're still accelerating,' Tom Skinner, a Center for Disease Control and Prevention spokesman, told reporters.
Viral: An early and hard-hitting flu season has swept America leaving thousands hospitalized
Overall, 41 states reported cases. 'It’s about five weeks ahead of the average flu season,' said Lyn Finelli, lead of the surveillance and response team that monitors influenza for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
'We haven’t seen such an early season since 2003 to 2004.' During that flu season, Joe Lastinger's daughter Emily, 3, died only five days after coming down with the flu in late January. 'That was the first really bad season for children in a while,' said Lastinger, 40.
'For whatever reason that's not well understood, it affected her and it killed her.' In that season, illnesses peaked in early to mid-December, with flu-related pneumonia and deaths peaking in early January. That season was considered a 'moderately severe' season for flu, and ended in mid-February. It's still too early to tell how bad this year's flu season will get.
While the CDC is waiting for more time to pass before classifying the season, Google Flu Trends Do you have the flu? These are the symptoms to watch for According to data being gathered by Flu Near You, flu cases have increased dramatically over the last few weeks.
Here are the season's most-reported symptoms:
1. Cough
2. Sore throat
3. Fatigue
4. Headache '
5. Body Ache
6. Fever
has already listed it as 'intense' by monitoring flu activity around the world based on internet search terms. And roughly 4 per cent of users on Flu Near You, a real-time tracking tool gaining about 100 new participants per week, say they're experiencing symptoms.
'That's huge,' John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston, told NBC News 'Last year, we never got near this.' Brownstein is one of the founders of Flu Near You, a project coordinated by Children’s Hospital Boston, the Skoll Global Threats Fund and the American Public Health Association.
The project has been a great tool for generating immediate data about the ongoing flu season. 'It’s what we call ‘nowcasting,'' Brownstein said. 'It’s a more up-to-date view.
CDC data can be as much as two weeks behind real-time reports. Preparing: Roughly three-fourths of people with the flu said they did not get vaccinations this year Brownstein's data shows cough is this year's most frequently reported symptom at 19 per cent, ahead of sore throat at 16 per cent, fatigue at 15 per cent, headache at 14 per cent, body ache at 10 per cent, and fever at 7 per cent. Three our of four people reporting flu symptoms had not been vaccinated. '
While Brownstein's data is more immediate, he cautioned against using it as an accurate measure of vaccine's effectiveness because of variables in reporting. During the 2010-2011 flu season, the CDC reports vaccine's were effective four about 60 percent for all age groups combined. While there were then reports of vaccinated people developing laboratory-confirmed flu strains,
CDC officials said it's not yet possible to know if this year's trends match up though they are 'watching the situation closely. Those officials also noted that this year's vaccines seem to be a good match for the two strains of influenza A and one of influenza B circulating.
The H3N2 strain is dominant this year, and it can cause more serious illnesses. Flu seasons vary widely in severity with some year's totaling up to 200,000 hospitalized and between 3,000 to 49,000 dead. About 127 million doses of flu vaccine have been distributed this year from the 15 million doses produced for this season.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2257597/Flu-infections-sweep-America-hospitalizing-thousands-leaving-18-children-dead-complications-going-worse.html
The world of hypocrisy, got to love how they selectively enforce the law. This poor shlub goes to jail and David Gregory does not. And you thought i was joking when i made comments in the past about the DC and its laws
MILLER: If you’re not David Gregory …
D.C. prosecutes ordinary Americans for ‘high-capacity’ magazines
The Washington Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) inquiry into whether NBC’s David Gregory broke the law by possessing a 30-round “high-capacity” magazine on national TV has been ongoing for three weeks. Meanwhile, U.S. Army veteran James Brinkley is still grappling with the fallout from his arrest last year on the same charge.Mr. Brinkley’s story is just one example of at least 105 individuals who, unlike Mr. Gregory, were arrested in 2012 for having a magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds.
On Sept. 8, Mr. Brinkley says he intended to drop his wife and young children at the White House for a tour and then head to a shooting range to practice for the U.S. Marshals Service test. Just like Mr. Gregory, Mr. Brinkley called MPD in advance for guidance on how he could do this legally. Mr. Brinkley was told that the gun had to be unloaded and locked in the trunk, and he couldn’t park the car and walk around.
Unlike Mr. Gregory, Mr. Brinkley followed the police orders by placing his Glock 22 in a box with a big padlock in the trunk of his Dodge Charger. The two ordinary, 15-round magazines were not in the gun, and he did not have any ammunition with him.
As he was dropping off his family at 11 a.m. on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Brinkley stopped to ask a Secret Service officer whether his wife could take the baby’s car seat into the White House. The officer saw Mr. Brinkley had an empty holster, which kicked off a traffic stop that ended in a search of the Charger’s trunk. Mr. Brinkley was booked on two counts of “high capacity” magazine possession (these are ordinary magazines nearly everywhere else in the country) and one count of possessing an unregistered gun.
Despite the evidence Mr. Brinkley had been legally transporting the gun, his attorney Richard Gardiner said the D.C. Office of the Attorney General “wouldn’t drop it.” This is the same office now showing apparent reluctance to charge Mr. Gregory.
Mr. Brinkley refused to take a plea bargain and admit guilt, so the matter went to trial Dec. 4. The judge sided with Mr. Brinkley, saying he had met the burden of proof that he was legally transporting. Mr. Brinkley was found not guilty on all firearms-related charges, including for the “high-capacity” magazines, and he was left with a $50 traffic ticket.
Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan told The Washington Times, “We feel it was a valid arrest, and the appropriate charges were brought.” Moments later, a spokesman for the D.C. attorney general's office, Ted Gest, called and provided the exact same quote. Mr. Gest added that, despite Mr. Brinkley’s acquittal, the ruling “doesn’t mean the judge is right, and we’re wrong.”
Mr. Brinkley believes the “Meet the Press” anchor is receiving special treatment because of his high-profile job. “I’m an average person,” Mr. Brinkley said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times. “There seems to be a law for us and a law for the upper echelon.”
Mr. Brinkley was publicly humiliated, thrown in jail and forced to spend money to defend himself for violating a law that millions of viewers watched the NBC anchor violate. If D.C. is going to have this pointless law, it should at least be enforced fairly.
Welfare recipients take out cash at strip clubs, liquor stores and X-rated shops
Welfare recipients took out cash at bars, liquor stores, X-rated video shops, hookah parlors and even strip clubs — where they presumably spent their taxpayer money on lap dances rather than diapers, a Post investigation found.
A database of 200 million Electronic Benefit Transfer records from January 2011 to July 2012, obtained by The Post through a Freedom of Information request, showed welfare recipients using their EBT cards to make dozens of cash withdrawals at ATMs inside Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn; the Blue Door Video porn shop in the East Village; The Anchor, a sleek SoHo lounge; the Patriot Saloon in TriBeCa; and Drinks Galore, a liquor distributor in The Bronx.
One EBT machine is stationed inside Club Eleven, an infamous Hunts Point jiggle joint known as much for its violent history as its girls in pink thongs.
Cops have been cracking down on the Bronx club since 2009 and shut it down temporarily in 2010. In July, five men were stabbed and two others shot outside after bouncers broke up a 4 a.m. brawl with pepper spray. The club appeared to be shuttered when The Post visited Thursday.
Club Heat, another Bronx strip club that dispenses EBT cash, is also no stranger to violence. A 33-year-old woman was fatally shot in the head outside the club in December 2011.
Critics blasted the government for turning a blind eye to welfare’s sleazy money.
“This is morally scandalous,” said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “I have nothing against strip clubs, but that’s not what benefits are for. I don’t blame [recipients]. If you are poor, it’s a crummy life and you want to have a drink or see a naked woman. I blame the people who are in charge of this.”
Welfare recipients receive food stamps and cash assistance under the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Both benefits are accessed through an EBT card, but only cash assistance — meant for housing, utilities and household necessities — can be accessed at ATMs.
A single-person household could receive a maximum $200 in monthly food stamps plus $158 in cash assistance. A family of four could get as much as $668 in food stamps and $433 in cash.
The food-stamp program prohibits the purchase of booze, tobacco and lottery tickets with an EBT card. But with the cash-assistance program, users can blow money on strippers or a six-pack and to tap welfare dollars from liquor stores, casinos and adult-oriented establishments.
The Post found dozens of pubs, nightclubs and tobacco shops where welfare dough was dispensed — and presumably spent.
The Boiler Room, a gay dive bar in the East Village, had $120 and $60 transactions a minute apart on Jan. 17, 2011. The bar is around the corner from a Bank of America that takes EBT cards.
West Village tobacco shop Shisha International had EBT transactions ranging from $40 to $180 in 2011. The store is near at least two EBT-friendly ATMs.
Legislative efforts to crack down on sinful spending have fallen short.
State Sen. Tom Libous (R-Binghamton) passed a bill in his chamber in June that would outlaw welfare withdrawals at gambling dens, strip clubs and other venues of vice, but the measure is gathering dust in the Democratic-controlled Assembly.
Libous is looking for a new Assembly sponsor to carry the bill in that house in the upcoming legislative session, after past sponsor George Latimer (D-Rye) was elected to the state Senate.
With only one of the city’s Assembly members, Nicole Malliotakis (R-B’klyn./SI), as a co-sponsor, the bill faces an uphill battle.
The Assembly typically doesn’t support welfare reform, because its more liberal members think the measures “hurt the poor,” Libous said. If the bill remains stalled, the state stands to lose $120 million in federal welfare funding.
The Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act, signed by President Obama last February, requires states to prohibit sinful welfare spending by 2014. If they don’t, they’ll forfeit federal cash.
“The people who are stealing from the program are the ones I want to go after,” Libous said. “Not someone who lost his job or a single mom who has to feed her kids. That’s what this program is supposed to be for.”
A spokesman with the US Department of Health and Human Services said states make their own rules on EBT cards.
Some states already limit where EBT cards can withdraw money.
A rep from OTDA, New York’s welfare office, said the state does not choose or regulate which retailers get ATMs that handle EBTs. Instead, retailers decide whether to use an ATM that accepts welfare cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment