Flu Season Around the Corner

              4-E Sun., Oct. 8. 1978 THE SHREVEPORT TIMES Health/Medicine
(Times photo by Billy Upsnaw)
Marie Gallagher, Dr. Burton West, and Dr. Pattie Van Hook discuss flu
Flu season around the corner
By JANIE FLOURNOY
Times Lifestyle Writer
The flu can be a killer.
A respiratory infection, influenza
attacks the young, old. healthy or ill.
With it comes aches in the muscles
and joints, fever, coughing, head-aches,
and loss of appetite. "You feel
as if your hair hurts," said Dr. Pattie
Van Hook, former director of the
Caddo Parish Health Unit.
She and three others from the
health unit and LSU School of Medi-cine
talked with The Times about the
flu and its prevention—the flu vac-cine.
In addition to Dr. Van Hook,
there were Dr. Burton West, as-sociate
professor of medicine and
chief of the section of infectious
diseases at the LSU School of Medi-cine;
Marie Gallagher, director of
education at the health unit, and
Mrs. Roma Caldwell, head of nursing
at the unit.
"You get the flu from other peo-ple,"
explained Dr. West. "After
exposure, it takes from one-and-a-half
to two days to get sick," and the
achiness can last from four to ten
days.
"Most healthy people get over it."
he said,"but even a few healthy
people will die. They get serious
pneumonia for which there is no
specific treatment. But the flu is
more serious for high risk persons—
those are the people with chronic
lung and heart disease, diabetics and
[those with kidney disease. Cancer
atients are also high risk, and, in
neral, people over the age of 64."
Even young people are not ex-empt.
Children who are chronically
ill are also considered high risk.
added Dr. Van Hook, and even young
adults are considered high risk with
certain strains of the flu.
There is not just one flu virus.
"The strains change," explained Dr.
West. "New ones come from nature,
and they're usually stronger. People
don't have resistance to them." This
is usually the case with an epidemic,
when a large number of people are
sick.
Because there is no real treatment
for the flu, prevention is the key to
management of the disease.
Doctors are constantly watching
all parts of the world for influenza
outbreaks to determine which kinds
of flu will be going around. With this
information, a vaccine is made to
prevent the spread of the virus.
There will be three viruses in the
vaccine this year, Dr. West ex-plained.
"One is the Russian flu
virus, another is a variant of the
Hong Kong and the third is also a
Hong Kong, but a B-type." Flu vi-ruses
are named for the area where
they are isolated initially.
The flu shot should be taken about
a month before the flu season begins
It takes that long tor the vaccine to
start working^.and it should be taken
annually. "Each year is a little dif-ferent,"
said Dr. Van Hook, "but our
flu season begins usually in Decem-ber
and January, then raises its ugly
head again in the last of February
and March. And it can occur in the
summer," she added.
The vaccine is available now from
private physicians, and Dr. Van
Hook and Dr. West both strongly
urge high risk persons to take the
vaccine. There will be no nationwide
vaccinatioh program this year like
the one in 1976 to prevent an
epidemic of the swine flu. Funding
was not appropriated by Congress.
"We have tentative plans to con-tinue
the program like last year,"
said Ms. Gallagher, "But we don't
have our guidelines yet. We expect to
hear next week."
But what about the risk of Guillain-
Barre—the paralysis that resulted
from the 1976 swine flu vaccine?
That was a very rare complica-tion,"
said Dr. Van Hook, "and that
was the first time it was associated
with influenza. I feel that the benefit
of the vaccine to high risk persons is
greater than the risk of Guillain-
Barre,"she said, getting a nod of
agreement from Dr. West.
"We've been giving vaccines since
195V. ' Dr. Van Hook recalled. "That
was when we had the first outbreak
of Asian flu." There have been other
epidemics of the flu, Dr. West
pointed out. but no large immuniza-tion
program until the mid '50s.
Two years ago, in 1976, the federal
government launched a major pro-gram
to vaccinate people against the
swine flu virus. The epidemic which
had been predicted never material-ized,
and the program backfired.
last year, no large outbreaks of the
fiu were expected, so a major vac-tine
program was not launched.
Hopefully, there will be no large
outbreaks this year either.