A Santa Monica nurse calls this year's version of the flu the Darth Vader of respiratory diseases. A hospital librarian says it made her sicker than she has been since college. An emergency room doctor in Pasadena says it's the worst she's seen in 13 years.
Given all the coughing and misery in Southern California in the last few weeks, it may come as a surprise, particularly to flu sufferers, that there is \o7 no\f7 epidemic of the disease in Los Angeles this year.
In fact, according to epidemiologists at the Los Angeles County Department of Health, this has been--and probably will continue to be--a rather "moderate" flu season, no worse than the last few years. Throughout the state and the nation, there has been a "lot of flu activity" and even some isolated outbreaks of epidemic proportions, but on the whole nothing out of the ordinary, according to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Flu is not a reportable disease, like AIDS or syphilis, so estimates are often not as precise as experts would like. Nonetheless, L.A. County is widely viewed as having a more sophisticated system for evaluating the severity of flu than many parts of the country. The Los Angeles system relies on three separate measures to determine the spread of the disease: the number of actual cases identified by laboratory tests, the number of flu-like symptoms reported to 50 designated hospitals, student health centers and physicians offices, and the number of respiratory-related deaths in the county.
During an average flu season, which will run here from November through early April, about 4% of all deaths can be attributed to the flu and its complications, which is what it is now running, said Frank Sorvillo, a county epidemiologist. Before the season has ended, one out of five people can be expected to come down with flu symptoms, including fever, chills, headache, stomachache, sore throat, gut-wrenching coughs, achy joints, painful eyeballs. According to Sorvillo, the rate of infection in Los Angeles now suggests that the figures for this year will be well within that range.
"But it's hard," Sorvillo admitted, "to convince people who have it that we aren't having an epidemic."
Dr. Raymond R. Neutra, chief of epidemiological studies at the California Department of Health in Berkeley, said laughingly in a telephone interview Friday that even he assumed there was an epidemic in Los Angeles.
