Flu Season

Flu Awareness information from SD57: http://www.sd57.bc.ca/fileadmin/sites/hr.sd57.bc.ca/Forms/Northern_Health_-_Flu_Awareness.pdf


Provincial health authorities are waiting for kids to get back to school to see whether the flu season has peaked or if the worst is yet to come.

“We doubt that it’s peaked,” said Dr. Perry Kendall, provincial health officer. “Basically, all schoolchildren are going back to school, which does provide greater opportunities for both respiratory viruses and gastrointestinal viruses to spread between the kids, and then from the kids back to their families.”


A particularly nasty form of influenza is spiking in B.C. at the same time as the worst norovirus outbreak in six years is hitting the province.

The influenza outbreak, which is expected to get worse, means people who haven’t yet had a flu shot — especially those in high-risk groups — should immediately do so, says the BC Centre for Disease Control.

“It’s moving up now, but I don’t think we’ve peaked,” said Dr. Danuta Skowronski, an epidemiologist and the centre’s influenza lead, on Thursday.


And did you know that there is a Google Flu? http://www.google.org/flutrends/ca/#CA-BC
Google has “found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity.”

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