Virus, Flu Season | featured news

Pregnant women should get flu shots, health experts say, but they've got to be more careful than others about over-the-counter medications for relief.

With the nation in the grip of a severe influenza outbreak that has seen deaths reach epidemic levels, New York State declared a public health emergency on Saturday, making access to vaccines more easily available.

Influenza has officially reached epidemic proportions in the United States, with 7.3 percent of deaths last week caused by pneumonia and the flu, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday. That is just above the epidemic threshold of 7.2 percent. Nine of the 10 U.S. regions had "elevated" flu activity, confirming that seasonal flu has spread across the country and reached high levels several weeks before the usual time of late January or February. The other region, the Southwest and California, had "normal" flu activity last week.

The H1N1 swine flu virus which swept the globe last year has returned to Britain with 10 people dying in the last six weeks, health officials said Saturday.

Most people are immune to the H1N1 flu virus that caused last season's pandemic, health officials report Tuesday.

Mary Peterson of Des Moines, Washington, doesn't believe the vaccine for the novel H1N1 flu has been studied enough to get it for herself and her daughters, who are 1 and 3 years old.

For 13-year-old Brandon Marti, the intranasal vaccine felt "good," "cold" and "watery" at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx, New York, on Tuesday.

The nation's secretary of health and human services told government leaders at a swine-flu preparedness summit Thursday that a vaccine to fight the H1N1 virus should be ready for distribution in mid-October.