So far, the flu season has had a slow start

Could this flu season that never happened?

After the drama in recent years with the H1N1, the small number of cases of influenza currently circulating U.S.  are reassuring, say the experts.

But this does not mean that the virus can not yet become the terrible enemy that often is added.

“If you look the country as a whole, we see that there is not much activity,” said Tom Skinner, spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of USA  in Atlanta. However, he emphasized that usually the flu season reaches its peak in the first two months of the year. “We expect increased activity in February to reach,” he said.

The health care providers across the country have echoed the findings.

On the East Coast, everything has been relatively quiet. “There has been little activity,” said Dr. Len Horovitz, a pulmonary specialist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

And in the west is the same. “Certainly in the southwest there appears to be much activity,” said Angela Golden, president-elect of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners (American Academy of Nurse Practitioners). “Even in [the area] emergency care, we do not see much.”

But Golden, who lives in northern Arizona, said that might simply be activating the season a little later than normal.

According to the CDC by the end of the first week of January there was a slight increase in influenza activity, but remained significantly low. The incidence of influenza was considered as “minimal” in 48 states, and even Colorado and New Hampshire showed slightly higher rates of illness than other states, it was not much follow-up data indicate CDC.

A barometer of influenza activity, the percentage of influenza-related visits to hospitals or doctors’ offices, also suggests a mild season so far. For example, only 1.4 percent of outpatient visits during the week ending January 7 were due to influenza, against a season average of 2.4 percent over the previous three years. And just one out of every 200,000 people had a bad flu requiring hospitalization, the CDC added.

The best news of all may come from statistics on children who are particularly vulnerable to flu. According to the CDC, so far no children have died of flu in the U.S., Compared with four pediatric deaths related to flu had been reported for the January 1, 2011.

Still, the experts stressed that the behavior of influenza virus is notoriously unpredictable, so you can not trust the current activity predict the remainder of the season. But there are some reassuring signs.

The strains of this year do not seem particularly strong and have a good agreement with the vaccine this season. “That’s good,” said Skinner. And the samples that have been evaluated apparently respond to antiviral Tamiflu (oseltamivir) and Relenza (zanamivir).

Only a small minority of the samples (about 3.4 per cent) are of the “swine flu” H1N1, which first appeared in 2009. Horovitz also believes that the low level of influenza activity this year could be because more people are vaccinated. He said his own practice almost running out of vaccine, when normally a lot left over.

Experts can not know with certainty whether widespread vaccination has something to do, Golden said, but “not too late to get vaccinated if you have not already done.”

Skinner agreed. “The bottom line is that the vaccine is still the most important thing people can do to protect yourself from the flu,” he said.