While the same flu strain can’t be caught twice, it’s possible to contract one strain and later suffer from another in a possible “double-barrel season,” as one expert put it.
“We have all these odd ingredients coming together so that we have, at this juncture, an awful lot of flu with the potential for being as bad as our last bad year, if not worse,” William Schaffner, MD, an infectious disease specialist with Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt University Medical Center and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Disease, told Prevention.
The CDC has confirmed at least 13 million cases of the flu this season, with the B virus emerging earlier than it has in the U.S. flu season for nearly 27 years. So far, there have been 39 confirmed pediatric flu deaths this season, with the B virus strains more common among children.
Early analysis of pediatric cases in Louisiana suggests that the strain in the vaccine does not match the subgroup of the B virus currently prominent, though the CDC says it is close enough to still offer some protection.
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