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Flu cases continue to spike across the St. Louis region, placing major stress on hospitals that are already at or near capacity.

“It’s posing significant challenges to ensure we can care for everyone in the community,” warned a report Wednesday by a task force of St. Louis-area hospitals.

While cases of respiratory syncytial virus that overwhelmed local hospitals in October have been dropping, they’re being replaced by a flu season that is coming fast and furious.

At Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, about 20 to 40 patients a day are coming to the emergency department with flu-like symptoms, and 10 to 20 are having to be admitted with flu, said Dr. Robert Poirier, a Washington University physician who serves as the emergency department’s clinical director.

More than 1,200 flu cases were reported from Nov. 13-19, according to the DOH.

Influenza type A has been the most common flu strain found in recent weeks. The DOH said 7.5% of physician visits between Nov. 13-19 were for flu-like illnesses, up from a 1.8% baseline.



No flu deaths were reported in 2020-2021 while 26 were reported in 2021-2022. The major decrease came amid the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing and mask-wearing, officials said.

Jason Montemayor, medical director for the northwest region at Providence, said increased flu activity was expected coming out of the pandemic.

Multnomah County and hospital officials are urging people to immediately take steps to stem the tide of respiratory virus infections that are causing “historical” levels of pressure on the local health care system, including by voluntarily wearing facial coverings through year’s end.

At issue is a confluence of factors several years in the making, including a general shortage of hospital staff and Oregonians’ weakened protections from influenza and RSV due to two years of isolation because of COVID-19. As a result, the tri-county area has seen the highest pediatric hospitalization numbers for RSV during the five years the state has tracked those numbers, even as the flu season is ratcheting up fast. On top of that, COVID-19 hospitalizations have climbed far more than was previously expected, further straining the health care system.

“We’ve used the word ‘unprecedented’ a lot in the last three years,” Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Jennifer Vines said at a press briefing Thursday. “So it’s hard to know how to ratchet that up. We are at what our people are calling a historical moment.”

The strain has hit children’s hospitals especially hard, in large part because of cases of RSV, a common virus that can be particularly dangerous to kids under five. All three of Oregon’s hospitals with pediatric intensive care beds recently switched to “crisis standards of care,” which allows them to assign more patients per staff member.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday it will begin testing wastewater samples for polio in Michigan and Pennsylvania as part of an effort to target parts of the country with low poliovirus vaccination rates and connections to New York communities where the virus was identified over the summer.

Testing will begin in a few weeks and is likely to include sewer samples from Oakland County, said Chelsea Wuth, a spokesperson for the state health department.

"Oakland is preliminarily where we are looking in consultation with CDC due to history of (vaccine-preventable disease) outbreaks," she said. "But we continue to triangulate where we have low coverage, risk of importation, previous vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks and appropriate sewer sampling locations."

Polio, a viral scourge that killed and crippled thousands of children in the 1940s and '50s, was thought to be eradicated in the United States. But a case was identified over the summer in a man from Rockland County, New York. He contracted vaccine-derived paralytic polio.

Since then, wastewater surveillance detected the virus in at least 82 sewage samples not only in Rockland County, but also in Orange, Sullivan and Nassau counties along with New York City, suggesting the virus has been spreading undetected for months in that region, according to the New York state health department.

The New Mexico Department of Health has issued a public health order due to an increase in respiratory virus cases and hospitalizations.

Every state hospital has been directed to work together as well as ensure that patients are treated with the appropriate levels of care through the order.

The NMDOH says the order is necessary because hospitals and emergency rooms are operating above their licensed capacity due to the surge in respiratory illnesses.

Respiratory diseases caused by RSV and other viruses are causing strain on pediatric hospital capacity in New Mexico. The health department says the state is nearing strain that would activate crisis standards of care.

Pediatric hospital beds have been more full than usual for months. Last month, children’s health leaders called for a formal emergency declaration from the US government to support hospitals and communities amid an “alarming surge of pediatric respiratory illnesses, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and influenza, along with the continuing children’s mental health emergency.”

Michigan’s largest health system, Corewell Health, ordered more than 50 additional cribs “to accommodate the surge in pediatric upper respiratory infections,” Tim Essenmacher of Corewell Health William Beaumont University Hospital and Corewell Health East’s Melanie Fisher told CNN in an email.



Demand at Hard Manufacturing, which makes cribs, bassinets and youth beds for hospitals, has shot up, President Marjorie Bryen said.

“It’s been a crazy time over the past 4-6 weeks and it doesn’t appear to be calming down anytime soon,” she wrote in an email.

Columbus Public Health announced Wednesday there are 59 confirmed measles cases and 23 measles-related hospitalizations.

All the cases are in Columbus and Franklin, Ross, and Richland counties.

All but three cases have been among unvaccinated people. Three cases are in partially vaccinated people.

According to CPH, 71% of the cases are in children between ages 1-5. 47% of the cases are female and 53% are male.

The rise of invasive strep A is one of a number of unusual ways pathogens have been interacting with us — and each other — amid the end of coronavirus-era social distancing and masking this year. Both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they are investigating the cases, including whether the viral storm that has been keeping many people sick may be at least partially to blame.

Why a 'tripledemic' is keeping some people sick for weeks, even months

Viral infections tend to create disorder in a person’s immune system, making it easier for a secondary bacterial infection to take hold and intensify its effects in some cases.

Minnesota health officials said they had seen 46 cases of invasive strep A in all ages in November, more than double the average 20 cases in previous months. Colorado reported that it was investigating not only a rise in invasive strep A cases, but also a possible increase in other severe or invasive bacterial infections in children.

“It could be we have altered patterns of immunity due to the pandemic that may have increased our vulnerability. But it could also be … different variants” of strep, he said. “It could be a combination of factors. No one knows.”

John Thomas8 wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 7:20 pm

The deadly Marburg virus has surfaced this week for the first time in Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon. The World Health Organization confirmed at least one death in Equatorial Guinea in West Africa and neighboring Cameroon said two suspected cases were detected, according to Reuters.

A handful of Marburg cases were identified in Ghana late last year. Although it remains “a very rare disease in people,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “when it occurs, it has the potential to spread” and can be fatal.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 spreads via nosocomial, public, and work-place based infections.

Transmission is thought to be direct via respiratory droplets or indirect via fomites and has led to increased interest in viral disinfection.

SARS-CoV-2 viral particles are composed of a core of nucleic acid chains that contain the genetic information of the virus, surrounded by a lipid membrane with proteinous spikes sticking out. Each component is necessary for infection.

In the new study, University of Southampton’s Sumeet Mahajan and colleagues investigated how UV laser light destroys the virus by impacting each of these critical components.

Nearly a quarter of syphilis cases in the U.S. were being diagnosed in women in 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday, in a sign that the nation's "alarming" epidemic of the sexually transmitted infection is increasingly spreading among heterosexual couples.

The number of syphilis cases reported in women climbed 19.5% in 2022. In all, there were 14,652 cases of primary and secondary syphilis, the first two stages of the disease, reported in women, making up roughly a quarter of the 59,016 cases nationwide. In 2018, just 14% of syphilis cases had been reported in women.

Men who have sex with men continue to make up a disproportionately large share of cases, the CDC says.

Health officials have warned for years about the nation's worsening syphilis epidemic. The CDC's final figures for 2022 are the largest number diagnosed nationwide since the 1950s.

While tens of thousands of syphilis cases and deaths used to be reported every year in the 1940s, the rollout of penicillin led to steep drops in rates of the disease over the last century.

Cases last peaked nationwide in the 1990s, before a yearslong decline that health officials say was likely driven by changes in sexual behavior due to the HIV epidemic.

"Controlling syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) requires robust public health systems and workforces, and prevention strategies that are tailored to the specific needs of affected communities. There are no shortcuts to syphilis control," Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, said in an emailed statement.

Syphilis rates have increased every year since 2011, and remain disproportionately high especially among Black and American Indian populations.

Over four years after SARS-CoV-2's debut, researchers still struggle to understand long COVID, including the ostensibly simple question of how many people have it. Estimates for its prevalence vary widely, based on different study methods and definitions of the condition. Now, for the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has attempted to estimate its prevalence among adults in each US state and territory. The results again show a wide range of prevalence estimates while revealing the states that were hardest hit as well as those that seem relatively spared.

Overall, the CDC found that seven states in the South, West, and Midwest had the highest prevalence of long COVID in the country, between 8.9 percent and 10.6 percent: Alabama, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming, and, the state with the highest prevalence of 10.6 percent, West Virginia. The results are published today in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

On the other end of the spectrum, New England states, Washington, and Oregon had lower prevalence rates, between 3.7 percent and 5.3 percent. The lowest rate was seen in the US Virgin Islands with 1.9 percent. Washington, DC, and Guam had ranges between 1.9 percent and 3.6 percent.