If you thought the season for getting the flu was over because winter is over..think again because a second wave might be on the way, the CDC warns. Sam Berman explains:
An uptick in influenza B at the end of an already turbulent flu season has some worried about a second wave of the disease.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly snapshot of flu activity in the United States, influenza strain B is now resulting in a larger number of flu cases than the A strain, H3N2, that dominated over the rest of the season.However, while it may be disconcerting to see a different strain causing more cases of flu, rates on the whole are on the wane. Strain B rearing its head at the end of a season is actually nothing out of the ordinary, explains Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.“The dominant strains every year are one of the A strains. They create the big epidemics. They create all the hullabaloo,” he said. “Now, behind the scenes as it were there are influenza B strains that are circulating at the same time. They cause illness that is just as severe, but the B strains, for biological reasons that we don’t understand, don’t create big epidemics, but they smolder along.”
