WHO urges vaccination for Northern Hemisphere.(World Health Organization )(influenza)(Brief Article)

1902 MAR 27 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- As the influenza season in the Northern Hemisphere reaches its peak, the World Health Organization (WHO) is scaling up its efforts to fight this potentially devastating disease.

Influenza is one of the oldest and most common diseases known to man. It can also be one of the deadliest. The "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 - considered to be the worst disease outbreak in the last century - claimed up to 40 million lives and is thought to have infected half the world's population. The possibility that this could happen again was exemplified by the A(H5N1) episode in Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region of China in 1997 when one-third of infected patients died. Fortunately, this outbreak did not develop into a global health emergency.

During the annual influenza epidemics, the disease infects as many as 100 million people each year in the Northern Hemisphere. Exact figures are unavailable for most countries but influenza kills approximately 20,000 people in the United States each year. The elderly and children below 1 year of age are particularly at risk.

For most healthy people, influenza amounts to high fever, headaches, coughing and a few days off work or school, followed by complete recovery. For the elderly and chronically ill however, the disease often leads to hospitalization and ...