1/2/2013
The flu is on the war path!
Sorry for the sporadic posting, but I put these together in my apartment and then upload them when I have time at the hospital where my Wi-Fi access is. Now with that out of the way…..
The flu has made it to Alaska! Interestingly enough, there is also a similar viral illness going around. It is only lasting for about 24 hours and all the “victims” are Flu A&B negative. Those that are Flu positive are predominately type A. So far we have only had two Type B positives.
Another interesting note is that the Flu vaccine has only been available here since the middle of December, so several of the patients with flu “had their flu shot”. Interestingly enough, those that had their flu shot and now have the flu, had their immunization less than 2 weeks before getting the flu. Their body did not have enough time to protect itself from the virus.
I have done some non scientific investigation into the evaluation and treatment of flu patients here. I got to wondering, actually Ralph was wondering, if we were getting flu swabs on appropriate patients. In other words, are we swabbing enough, too much, or just the right amount of patients? If we are not swabbing enough, we are missing cases. If we are swabbing everyone, we are artificially inflating the cost of health care. If we are swabbing “appropriately” we may miss one here and there, but we will be catching the majority of cases. At least, that is how Ralph and I think.
So, I went to the lab and tallied up the total number of flu swabs done, the number of A positives, and the number of B positives. Using scientifically primitive math skills, I determined that 65% of the swabs we have done were positive. It would seem to me and Ralph that this indicates we are reasonably appropriate with our swabbing.
Now some of you are in epidemiology and have real scientific evidence based data about the appropriate percentage of positives to negatives I am sure. I would appreciate your input on this so all of us can evaluate our practices and adjust accordingly. Please let us know what the “evidence based practice” goals should be.
We are not even swabbing anymore....CDC says the false negatives are as high as 50% this year, treat by symptoms, not swabs. So that is what we are doing now...their recommendations have changed several times this year :-) We are also admitting quite a bit of post-flu pneumonia.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, Andrew and I both got our flu shots in Oct. We both had the flu in the last two weeks. I took Tamiflu and it was tolerable. He did not and it was not :-0 But no complications....
Glad you are both better. Alaska Public Health is wanting the swabs sent in that are negative if the patient has the "flu constelation" of symptoms. They supposedly are gathering data.
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