ER doctor shares how to prepare for flu season with a ‘flu box’
(NEW YORK) — With autumn in full swing, flu season is ramping up as well.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, flu season in the U.S. typically picks up in the fall and winter months and children, especially, are the most likely to get sick from influenza, a type of respiratory virus.
Here’s how to prepare for the season ahead:
What causes influenza (flu)?
The flu is caused by various influenza viruses that impact the respiratory system. For the 2024-2025 flu season, the CDC expects the dominant influenza viruses in the U.S. to be an A(H1N1) virus, an A(H3N2) virus, and a B/Victoria virus.
What are common flu symptoms?
Symptoms of the flu can vary but per the CDC, they may include fever or chills, a cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle or body aches, headaches, fatigue, vomiting or diarrhea. The latter two symptoms are more common among children with the flu.
What is the flu incubation period and when are you most contagious?
Individuals with the flu can spread the virus to others, and according to the CDC, the incubation period can last between one and four days. The first three days of an infection tend to be the most contagious period.
The CDC recommends a flu vaccine for nearly everyone six months and older in the U.S. every flu season, except for anyone younger than six months or anyone with a severe, life-threatening allergy to any ingredient in a vaccine or the flu vaccine specifically.
What months are considered flu season?
The flu is most active between the fall and winter months. During the 2023 to 2024 flu season, CDC reports showed that national flu activity started to increase in October 2023 and didn’t start to decline until mid-April 2024.
How can you prepare for flu season?
Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and a mom, shared in a TikTok post what she keeps on hand at home to stay prepared for flu season.
Her top items include:
Disposable vomit bags
Acetaminophen/Ibuprofen in multiple forms, including chewable tablets, liquid form or suppositories
Digital Thermometer
Zyrtec or a similar second-generation histamine for allergic reactions or hives
A portable pulse oximeter to measure heart rate and oxygenation
Packs of electrolyte powder
Cough suppresants and oral anesthetics including those in lollipop forms
Saline nasal mist
A squeeze bottle kit for over-the-counter saline solutions
(ATLANTA) — The estimated number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. have been dropping for months and are now at their lowest levels in three years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Deaths from overdoses dropped for the first time in five years in 2023, following a steady rise during the pandemic. However, the current number of overdose deaths still remains higher than pre-pandemic levels.
In April 2024, the latest month with data, the estimated number of deaths in the past 12 months was 101,168, according to the CDC. The last month with figures that low was in May of 2021, with 100,997 deaths.
Data from other sources, such as emergency department visits and calls to EMS, support the downward trend, according to an analysis led by Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, a senior scientist at the Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He tells ABC News that the data may point to 20,000 fewer deaths annually, or more.
While experts continue to explore possible reasons driving the decline, there are a few public health initiatives to curb drug overdoses that may be showing signs of success.
“Enhanced access to naloxone, expanded treatment programs for opioid use disorder, and increased public awareness about the dangers of synthetic opioids like fentanyl are likely playing significant roles in saving lives,” said Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News medical contributor.
Another potential explanation for the downturn, Dasgupta says, may be related to changes in the drug supply, such as more people using xylazine, a dangerous, non-opioid animal sedative that’s often mixed with other illicit drugs, including fentanyl.
“Xylazine makes people use less fentanyl, is the bottom line,” Dasgupta told ABC News, while citing research that showed that those who overdosed and tested positive for xylazine had less severe health outcomes than those who did not have xylazine in their system. This could be due to the fact that those who used illicit substances, like fentanyl, mixed with xylazine may be using those substances less often, Dasgupta said.
“We’re seeing this pattern kind of happening that looks a lot like a change in the drug supply, more so than just explained by all the interventions in the public health space,” Dasgupta added. “It’s probably a mix of all these things at the end of the day, but something really changed in the third quarter of last year.”
Within each state, however, the decline in overdose deaths is not uniform among all people. Maryland, for example, experienced a decline in deaths among white populations, yet an increase among Black populations, Dasgupta points out.
Changes in drug overdose deaths also vary greatly by state, with some still experiencing increases in the past 12 months, CDC data shows. States with the greatest dips in overdose deaths over the past year, according to the same data, were Nebraska, North Carolina, Vermont, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, in that descending order.
While the national downward trend may continue, experts told ABC News it may not be permanent.
“We’ve seen dips that have been erased a year later. So, I’m cautious. I feel like things really haven’t cooled down yet,” Dasgupta said. “It feels like we’ve put the lid on the pot, but we’re still at a rolling boil. There’s still a lot of people dying of overdose.”
“It’s crucial that we continue to intensify our efforts to address the root causes of the opioid epidemic,” Brownstein said. “We need to continue investing in comprehensive strategies that address the complex factors driving the opioid crisis.”
Jake Goodman, MD, MBA is a psychiatry resident physician and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
(NEW YORK) — COVID-19 has significantly fallen as a leading cause of death in the U.S. for the first time since the pandemic began, according to new provisional data published Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In 2023, the virus was the tenth-leading cause of death among Americans, down from the fourth-leading cause in 2022 and the third-leading cause of death between March 2020 and October 2021.
The report also found that overall deaths fell significantly from 2022 to 2023.
The report did not go into reasons for why deaths have fallen, but Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor, said likely reasons include the prevention of COVID fatalities through vaccines, treatments for early onset illness and a better overall understanding of the virus.
“Being on the other side of the pandemic played a big part in seeing this overall mortality rate go down,” he said. ‘This is, in large part, related to the public health effort, especially vaccines that, of course, saved so many lives.”
For the report, researchers looked at preliminary death certificate data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ (NCHS) National Vital Statistics System.
In 2023, there were about 3.09 million deaths in the U.S. with an age-adjusted rate of 750.4 deaths per 100,000 people. This is a decrease of 6.1% from the rate of 798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022.
Additionally, death rates were highest among males, older adults and Black Americans, according to the report.
The three leading causes of death in the U.S. were heart disease, cancer and unintentional injury, respectively, which is unchanged from 2022.
Last year marked the first time since the pandemic began that COVID-19 was not one of the top five leading causes of death. Provisional data showed COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 1.6% of all deaths in 2023, decreasing from 5.7% in 2022.
The COVID-19 death rate fell from 58.7 per 100,000 deaths in 2022 to 18.2 per 100,000 in 2023, the report found.
The number of COVID-19-associated deaths fell from 2023 across all age groups and racial/ethnic groups.
Death rates from COVID-19 were highest among those aged 75 and older — highlighting the impact the virus has had on the elderly population. However, the gap between death rates among racial/ethnic groups shrunk from 2022 to 2023.
In 2022, the COVID death rate for white Americans was 58.6 per 100,000 compared to 71.0 per 100,000 for Black Americans. In 2023, the rate was 19.6 per 100,000 for white Americans and 17 per 100,000 for Black Americans.
“Because of the wide disparities that exist in COVID-related deaths, and we know that COVID deaths were not equal across the population, especially hit…Black populations and other and African American people, it’s not surprising that when you overall reduce COVID deaths, that will overall contribute to potentially sort of a closing of the gap,” Brownstein said.
He added that there is more work to be done to close the gap even further, including providing access to health care and insurance for traditionally underserved populations.
Brownstein also said he hopes more efforts can be made to reduce deaths from traditional leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer.
“We’ve made a big dent in COVID as a result of response efforts,” he said. “But now there’s still such an important effort to deal with some of these other leading causes of death. These data are important because they can help from an awareness perspective and an allocation of research resources.”
(NEW YORK) — Children with long COVID-19 may show different symptoms depending on their age, a new study suggests.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA, is the first looking at how long COVID affects children and teens from the National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded RECOVER initiative, which seeks to better understand, diagnose, prevent and treat the condition.
Among younger children, between ages 6 and 11, headache was the primary symptom followed by trouble with memory, focus and sleep, as well as stomach pain.
Teens and pre-teens between ages 12 and 17 tended to report more fatigue-related symptoms, such as daytime sleepiness or low energy, body aches and pains, and neurological symptoms, including headaches and difficulty with memory and focus. This age group was also more likely to experience changes in taste or smell.
“We really wanted to understand how does long COVID look different across the ages?” Dr. Rachel Gross, lead study author and a general pediatrician and clinical researcher at NYU Langone Health, told ABC News.
Study participants were recruited from more than 60 U.S. health care and community settings between March 2022 and December 2023, with children between ages 6 and 17 with and without previous COVID-19 infection.
“We know that children are changing over time, we know that they’re growing over time, that they’re developing, that their immune system may be changing, that their hormones may be changing. So, we weren’t surprised that we were seeing differences across these different age groups,” Gross said. “But next steps, we really need to understand why this is happening so we can understand the underlying mechanisms that may be related to these differences.”
Gross said most of what researchers know about long COVID comes from studies of adults, and this is one of the first studies to characterize what prolonged symptoms children may be experiencing. She said much more long COVID research needs to focus on children.
“There have been many misperceptions about COVID and children, even since the beginning of the pandemic,” she said. “There was a common misperception that children didn’t get COVID infections, and we know that’s not true. And now there’s a common misperception that children don’t develop long COVID, and we know from studies like this and others that that is not true, and that long COVID in children is not a rare condition.”
‘I can’t figure out what’s wrong’
Gabrielle “Gabby” Jospa, from Plainview, New York, is one of many children who knows all too well that children can, and do, develop long COVID.
The now 15-year-old contracted COVID-19 in December 2021. At first, she thought it was just a cold or a less severe virus. However, she developed severe symptoms including a high fever, fast heart rate, nausea, body aches, stomachache and falling oxygen levels that required a visit to the emergency room, Gabby told ABC News.
Once the initial symptoms were gone, there were many lingering after-effects. Gabby’s pulse and oxygen levels improved but not to where they were pre-COVID, according to her mother, Amy Jospa, and they knew something was wrong.
Gabby started experiencing fatigue and brain fog, and developed swollen joints, unexplained rashes and even postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a condition that causes the heart to beat faster than normal when transitioning from sitting or lying down to standing, Amy Jospa told ABC News.
Gabby also has a history of migraines, experiencing them about once a year, but they worsened after COVID-19 to once per week and then once per day. They visited several doctors, none of whom could figure out what was wrong.
“The doctors will just tell you like — and it’s not the doctor’s fault — ‘Oh, it’s just a cold’ or ‘Oh, I’ll just give you headache medicine’ but it doesn’t go away, and you’re starting to feel after a while, after seeing a million doctors, like ‘I can’t figure out what’s wrong with me. It’s hopeless,'” Gabby told ABC News.
In September 2023, with some help from Gabby’s cardiologist getting her the right series of tests, Gabby was diagnosed with long COVID. Gabby said she was “excited” more than upset to finally have a proper diagnosis.
Gabby and her mother tried to enroll in several long COVID studies at hospitals but she was rejected before she was accepted into the RECOVER study at NYU Langone, and had her first in-person visit in November 2023.
They say the RECOVER study has been helpful in terms of helping Gabby improve and better manage her long COVID symptoms.
“The RECOVER study also doesn’t include just medical testing,” Amy Jospa said. “They do cognitive testing on her, and it’s helped Gabby feel more normal and less stigmatized about the process, because she’s not the only one with brain fog. Like, ‘I have this; it stinks, but I’m not alone, and there are people who are working really hard to figure this out and get me to where I need to be.’ It’s like positive change, and I think that’s been the nicest part, seeing the shift mentally for her.”
Gabby and her mother say she’s still not 100% back to where she was before COVID. Before contracting COVID, Gabby, who swims competitively, used to be able to swim for 45 minutes straight. Now, she physically exhausts more easily so she needs breaks.
Amy Jospa said they made modifications to Gabby’s gym schedule at school and that Gabby has more time between classes because she can’t rush in the hallways between classes.
“I still manage, even though there are struggles,” Gabby said. “I managed to find a way to make it work so I can keep going mentally as well as physically.”
ABC News’ Dr. Kierstin Luber contributed to this report.