WSJ: Flu Economy Takes Unexpected Turn
April 3, 2008 -- The surprising course of the latest flu season -- one of the most unpredictable in years -- has been a headache for companies from tissue makers to hospital owners.
In recent seasons, the flu has generally hit hard in December and peaked in February before petering out in March. But this year it followed a different pattern, getting off to a tamer start than usual and then roaring back in late February with the strongest surge in years. One reason: Vaccine planners failed to accurately predict the strains of the virus that would emerge this winter, making the flu shots most people got less effective than usual.
By February, every state in the country was reporting widespread flu outbreaks except Florida, which as an exception had been hit earlier in the season. Maine was one of the last states to see an outbreak, but it got walloped in March. One high school in the central part of the state reported in early March that 40% of its some 1,000 students were home sick, and dozens of other schools have reported absence rates of at least 15%. "This definitely is one of the worst seasons ... in my 12 years on the job," says Dora Mills, the state's public-health director.
Through the second week of March, the flu remained rampant in more than 40 states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was still widespread in 17 states as of March 22 and persisted in pockets in most other states, according to the latest data available from the CDC.
A confluence of factors seem to have contributed to this year's flu season. The strains of flu that have predominated in the U.S. in recent years are known as H1N1. Health officials predicted last year that that trend would continue, so pharmaceutical companies pumped out vaccines to target those strains. But H3N2 strains proved more prevalent this year. To make matters worse, H3N2 is a particularly nasty variety of the flu.
Moreover, flu season is inherently unpredictable, starting as early as October and sometimes peaking only in April. Even the right vaccine doesn't prevent outbreaks altogether, as a relatively small number of people get vaccinated. Manufacturers distributed about 115 million doses last year, so no more than about a third of Americans were vaccinated at all.
