Respiratory illness season is ramping up fast in Alberta, with a massive jump in numbers coming into December that is keeping emergency room physicians and other health-care workers busy.
“We are seeing numbers that we’ve never seen before in our emergency departments,” said Dr. Louis Francescutti, a University of Alberta public health professor and emergency physician at the Royal Alexandra Hospital and Northeast Community Health Centre in Edmonton.
“Influenza has arrived, and a lot of our numbers are driven by influenza.”
Alberta’s current respiratory season started on Aug. 24.
As of Nov. 29, there has been 2,180 laboratory-confirmed seasonal influenza cases. Just over 500 of those required hospitalization, 31 of which ended up in the ICU. There had been 15 deaths.
A week later, the numbers jumped up by 70 per cent.
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Provincial data showed as of Dec. 6, there were 3,703 lab-confirmed influenza cases, over 800 hospitalizations, including 54 ICU admissions, and 21 deaths.
Dr. Shazma Mithani, another emergency room physician at the Royal Alex who also works at the Stollery Children’s Hospital, on Wednesday said recently she’s treated an average of four to five patients a shift who are testing positive for influenza A.
“Coming in with really debilitating symptoms like fevers going on for days, feeling super gross, body aches everywhere, super low energy, cough, shortness of breath and many of these patients are actually needing admission.
“One of the common themes is that most of these people needing admission do not have their flu shot.”
Two strains of influenza A — H3N2 and H1N1 — are circulating across Canada, but H3N2 appears to be the dominant strain this year, which Mithani said makes the flu shot about 30 to 40 per cent effective at preventing the disease.
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H3N2 tends to make older people sicker because they’ve built up more immunity to H1N1 over the course of their lifetimes, Montreal Children’s Hospital pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Jesse Papenburg said last week.
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Hospitals are seeing more children sick with flu after the virus began circulating earlier than usual this year.
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A surveillance network covering 15 children’s hospitals across the country shows a rise in emergency department visits for the flu.
H3N2 has mutated over the last several months, Papenburg said, meaning the vaccine may not offer as much protection against that strain as infectious disease specialists had hoped.
“What we’ve seen is that the virus evolved a little bit from the time that the choices were made for the vaccine strains. And this H3N2 strain that is circulating is not a perfect match with what is in the vaccine,” he said.
But it’s still worth getting the shot, doctors say, because some protection is better than none to reduce the risk of complications, being hospitalized or dying.
But it isn’t just the flu driving people to seek help in emergency rooms.
Last month a tuberculosis outbreak was declared in central Edmonton, where several cases have been detected among people who live in the inner-city or are homeless and spend their time in the downtown core.
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This, after a Shigella outbreak spread through the same community a few years ago. Shigella is an acute infectious disease that’s commonly associated with diarrhea, as well as fever, nausea and stomach cramps. A strain of the bacteria causes dysentery.
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“We’ve got TB in the inner city, shigella is probably going to be showing up again soon,” Francescutti said.
“These crowded conditions just spread disease.”
Outside of hospitals, pharmacists say this year’s cold and flu season appears to be hitting people harder than in recent years.
Medicine Shoppe pharmacist Rosalina Yuen is seeing lots of people seeking relief from sore throats, runny noses, cough, tightness in their chest and some are also losing their voice. While exhausting, most of those symptoms can be treated at home if they are not severe.
“Because it’s viral infection, we’ll tell them to restore like a lot of rest, increase fluids, and just don’t go to work — rest at home so that it doesn’t get spread.”
Yuen also stressed the importance of flu and COVID shots.
“It’s available publicly for people that are qualified for certain conditions, or they are low-income seniors, they can get it from the public health.”
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The Alberta government is providing the COVID vaccine for free to people with the following conditions:
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- Cerebrovascular disease
- Chronic liver diseases
- Chronic lung diseases
- Chronic kidney diseases
- Cystic fibrosis
- Diabetes (Type 1 and Type 2)
- Disabilities (for example, Down syndrome; learning, intellectual or developmental disabilities; ADHD; cerebral palsy; congenital disabilities; spinal cord injuries)
- Heart conditions (for example, cardiomyopathies, coronary artery disease, heart failure)
- Mental health disorders (limited to: mood disorders, including depression; schizophrenia, spectrum disorders)
- Obesity
- Pregnancy
- Tuberculosis
- Cancer (in treatment)
- HIV infection
- Primary immunodeficiency diseases
- Solid organ or blood stem cell transplant
- Use of corticosteroids, other immunosuppressive medication or CAR T-cell therapy
Yuen said those who don’t qualify for an exemption can also try to get the $100 COVID vaccine covered by their private health insurance.
“We can run the insurance through. Sometimes they’re covered for quite a bit,” she said, adding a lot of people aren’t aware that is an option.
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–with files from Nicole Ireland, The Canadian Press
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