LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas had its first reported influenza death last week, state health officials announced Tuesday, two weeks after they reported the disease had spread to two-thirds of the state’s counties.
The person who died this flu season was an Arkansas resident, was older than 65 and had underlying health conditions, Arkansas Department of Health spokesman Ed Barham said.
“In years past, we have seen most of the flu deaths in people who are over 65, but last year it was the other way around - most of the deaths occurred in those who were 64 years of age and younger,” Barham said, referring to an unusual characteristic of the 2009-2010 season’s “swine” flu.
“This year, it is too early to tell how the statistics will turn out.”
By Tuesday, “virtually all” 75 counties were reporting flu cases, Barham said.
And at the state’s largest campus, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville reported a rising number of flu cases among students, faculty and staff members within the past three weeks.
UA-Fayetteville’s Pat Walker Health Center identified 44 flu cases during that period, according to a news release. While it didn’t characterize the number as an outbreak, it is cause for concern, officials said urging patients to “self isolate” until their fever subsided for 24 hours.
“This year’s season got started later than last year’s, but the number of illnesses in the state is rapidly increasing,” the department’s branch chief for infectious diseases, Dr. James Phillips, said in a news release announcing the state’s first flu death.
“We want people to know that the flu is going around.”
Barham said he couldn’t reveal the county where the flu victim lived, what flu strain was responsible, whether the victim had been vaccinated for the particular strain contracted - or inoculated for flu at all.
He cited a federal privacy law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
Barham said releasing the name of the county in instances where a health issue has affected so few people in relation to the county’s overall population could make the person identifiable, violating the law.
The annual flu vaccine that is developed in the United States typically targets what epidemiologists believe will be the three most dominant strains of that particular season.
During the 2008-2009 flu season, five flu deaths were reported in Arkansas, Barham said.
But then came the 2009 swine flu, which broke out much earlier in the flu season and behaved differently from many other flu strains. Health officials had already prepared the seasonal flu vaccine with its trio of targets, so they rushed to develop a separate swine flu vaccine for that flu season.
Health officials described the 2009 swine flu as less virulent and less deadly than many typical, seasonal flu strains, but more easily spread.
In the end, it ended up dominating the flu cases in Arkansas.
During the 2009-2010 flu season, all 53 of Arkansas’ flu deaths were attributed to the swine flu, which Barham and Phillips refer to as the “2009 novel H1N1 flu virus.”
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially dubbed the virus a swine flu. But later the health agency began referring to it as the “novel H1N1” virus or the “2009 H1N1” virus, in part because it contains a mix of pig, avian and human genes.
In Arkansas just like the rest of the United States, flu deaths vary widely from year to year, so the jump from five to 53 deaths in a year’s time is not necessarily unusual.
For years, the CDC routinely estimated that seasonal flu strains accounted for 36,000 deaths annually, sometimes couching the statistic by saying it applied to a “typical season.”
But on Aug. 26, 2010, the CDC released some new numbers. In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the agency said the figure was based on data from the decade of the 1990s when H3N2 flu strains dominated.
H3N2 strains are typically nearly three times more deadly than H1N1 strains, something the CDC said might be owed in part to the H3N2 viruses mutating more rapidly.
The CDC’s new figure, about 23,600 annual deaths, was based on a range of about 3,000 annual deaths to about 49,000 between 1976 and 2007, according to a transcript from its news briefing on the change.
Last flu season, Arkansas health officials gave out more than 800,000 doses of flu vaccine, which included both the traditional seasonal and swine flu kinds.
For this flu season, state Health Department officials ordered 599,800 doses of the vaccine, Barham said, using a combination of state funds and Vaccines For Children money. This time, the strains it covers include the 2009 “swine” flu virus.
Of those, 583,460 doses were distributed to places such as local health units and nursing homes.
“As of today, we have administered approximately 262,764 doses, but that does not include doses that have been given by private physicians, clinics, retailers, pharmacies or other providers,” Barham said.
That number stood at 241,667 the last time the Health Department had a more complete report - Jan. 3 of this year, he said.
At that time, the Health Department had given 156,646 doses to public and private schoolchildren through its school vaccination clinics, 79,977 during its mass flu clinics for the general public and 5,044 doses at day-care centers and other agencies.
Arkansas, Pages 11 on 02/02/2011