Science Ticker Health & Medicine

The CDC says 80,000 people died from the flu last year

That makes the 2017–2018 flu season one of the deadliest in the United States

sick people

TERRIBLE TOLL  An estimated 80,000 Americans died — and 900,000 were hospitalized — during the 2017-2018 flu season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

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By Aimee Cunningham

In the past year, the flu killed an estimated 80,000 Americans — the country’s highest death toll from flu and related complications in more than a decade, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The 2017–2018 flu season has been classified as one of “high severity” (SN: 7/7/18, p. 16), with some 900,000 people hospitalized with flu symptoms — the highest hospitalization rate since the 2005–2006 season. A record 180 children died, as of August. Only the 2009 flu pandemic had more child deaths, with 358.

The high total death toll was “not surprising,” CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund says, given that the main virus circulating “was influenza A H3N2, and we know that virus tends to be severe for young children and the elderly.”

U.S. health officials are now gearing up for a new flu season. “It is not possible to predict what this flu season will be like,” Nordlund says.

Aimee Cunningham

About Aimee Cunningham

Aimee Cunningham is the biomedical writer. She has a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University.

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