It is flu season, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the number of cases is up sharply, with high activity reported in 26 states.

At the Palomar Medical Center near San Diego, the new year ushered in a brutal flu season.

"The day came when we had extended waits in the emergency department up to eight or nine hours for a patient to be seen," said Michelle Gunnett, emergency room nursing director. "We need to figure out other space to see patients."

That space ended up being a triage tent set up right outside the ER.

California is one of the 26 states reporting high flu activity. San Diego County, with 7,314 confirmed cases, 안산출장마사지 - https://www.popanma.com/%ec%95%88%ec%82%b0%ec%b6%9c%ec%9e%a5%ec%83%b5%cf... has had more than eight times the number seen this time last year.

Other areas feeling the strain include some Miami hospitals preparing flu tents. Emergency visits at a hospital in Toledo, Ohio surged 10 to 15 percent in a single week. A hospital system in Dallas is at critical capacity, and is rerouting non-emergency ambulance patients.

Dr. Allan Hansen heads up Palomar's ER.

"It's a virus that is a flu strain that's been seen before," he said. "It's not clear why the volume of infection is so high at this time."

The strain, called H3N2, tends to cause especially severe illness. Last season's vaccine was only 32 percent effective against H3N2. It's unclear how effective this year's vaccine - http://www.blogher.com/search/apachesolr_search/year%27s%20vaccine will be, but the CDC has advised people to begin antiviral treatment as soon as possible with drugs like Tamiflu.

Even though the flu shot may only be partially effective, the CDC still recommends getting it since some protection is better than none. If you do get the flu, having had the vaccine might lessen the severity of it.

The call for bolder action in schools follows the Institute of Medicine's recommendations last month calling for a wide-ranging attack on childhood obesity by involving parents, schools, communities and the government.

Estimates are that more than 15 percent of American children are very overweight, or obese.

Laura Hayman, a nurse and professor who wrote the heart association statement, said national data show about 80 percent of children aren't getting the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day. She also said that 44 percent of high school students aren't in physical education - http://www.homeclick.com/web/search/search.aspx?Ntt=physical%20education classes.

"Through schools, hopefully you can reach the children, teachers and parents," said Hayman, 고양출장마사지 - https://www.startopanma.com/%ea%b3%a0%ec%96%91%ec%98%a4%ed%94%bc%ea%b1%b... who teaches at New York University and Lenox Hill Heart and Vascular Institute of New York.

Experts agree that the schools - http://www.express.co.uk/search/schools/ are a good place to start.

Judith Young, of the Virginia-based nonprofit American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, said educating kids on the issue is critical. "If we don't teach them how to keep themselves healthy, then all the other things kind of don't matter."

The heart association statement, published in the journal Circulation, calls for more phys ed classes, heart-healthy meals and a tobacco-free environment from preschools through 12th grade and during after-school programs.

Dr. Catherine L. Webb, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, points out that families are often collectively obese.

"When a child starts to bring home knowledge, then the family I think will jump on the bandwagon," said Webb, who works on a heart association council focusing on cardiovascular disease among young people

Obesity is linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and other problems, and it's a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, Hayman said.

The heart association recommendations call for teaching kids the major risk factors for cardiovascular disease and ways to avoid it.

The group also recommends that physical education be required at least three times a week from kindergarten through 12th grade — with 150 minutes in school each week for elementary students and at least 225 minutes per week for middle school students.

According to the recommendations, school meals should meet heart-healthy guidelines.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs, who issued a school nutrition policy that took effect this year restricting fried and fatty servings and setting other food rules, said that school administrators understand the importance of physical education and nutrition, but they are dealing with limited resources.

More health education, for instance, might cost money for printed materials.

"A lot of (schools) are saying we'd love to do it, but give us the resources," Combs said.

Health officials nationwide are urging healthy adults and schoolchildren to skip the shot, after British regulators - http://www.zixiutangpollencapsules.com/?s=British%20regulators shut down a major flu-shot supplier for the U.S.

With 46 million doses now unavailable, the government says the 54 million flu shots left from a rival firm should be reserved for youngsters - http://www.healthynewage.com/?s=youngsters ages 6-23 months, people 65 or older, anyone living with babies younger than 6 months and others in high-risk groups.

Some state health officials are now watching for 하남출장마사지 - https://www.anmaop.com/%ed%95%98%eb%82%a8%ec%b6%9c%ec%9e%a5%ec%83%b5%cf%... price gouging.

Barbara Ertle, the pharmacy director at Saint Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Md., says some wholesalers are charging exorbitant prices for flu vaccines, as much as $650 for 10 shots.

"You need to pay a bit of a premium, but 'a bit of a premium' is not 60 times the price," she told CBS Radio News. You have to say, 'where is a legitimate profit and where is this price-gouging?'"

St. Joseph has no flu vaccine at all, Ertle reports. The shutdown of flu vaccine production at Chiron Corp. has slashed supplies across the nation. Public health clinics in Georgia and Pennsylvania will lose nearly a third of their doses. Minnesota canceled flu clinics for state employees and set aside vaccines for those at high risk.

The news carries particular concern in Colorado, which was the epicenter of last year's flu season with 12,885 reported cases and the deaths of 12 children.

Josh Duignan got his first flu shot last year when his wife was pregnant with their first child. While son Ethan will get a shot this year, Duignan isn't sure whether he'll also get a chance to roll up his sleeve.

Duignan, in Colorado, knows his pediatrician has enough doses to vaccinate Ethan, now 7 months, but isn't sure whether he will get a shot.

"If they turn me down, I don't know what I'll do," he said. "But I'm going to get one this year. I promised my wife I would."

Those who can't get the shots still have alternatives, says The Early Show's Dr. Emily Senay.

There are three antiviral medications on the market that can be used for people who come in contact with the flu to prevent them from getting it. These are prescription medications, and while not everyone can take them, she expects them to be used more widely than in the past.

But Senay says good hygiene is still the best non-vaccine preventative.

"I can't say enough about hand washing again and again," she said. "Studies show that hand washing will dramatically reduce your risk of getting all sorts of things, not just the flu, but gastrointestinal illness and colds."

Another possibility is hand sanitizers.

"Those work, too. Throw one of those in your pocket and take it with you.

"You have to remember the flu virus can live on surfaces for hours so if you touch a door knob that someone has just passed through, you want to avoid putting your hands on your face and your nose to reduce your risk of transmitting it to yourself," she added.

Doctors at Arvada Pediatric Associates in suburban Denver normally recommend flu shots for siblings of children with asthma and other risky conditions. But even those children are expected to forgo shots this year, president Charyl LeBlanc said as the office fielded calls from panicked parents.

"It's been a wild day," LeBlanc said Wednesday. "Part of the problem is everybody is remembering the flu season last year, particularly in Colorado."

"It's kind of disappointing that we didn't have more than two sources to get the vaccine," complained Dan Knuth, 59, of New Brighton, Minn., who said he probably won't get a shot this year. "It shows the vulnerability of our health care system."

"Worst-case scenario, we will have probably more patients being hospitalized with pneumonia," said Dr. Wellington Liu, medical director of Kateri Medical Residence in New York City, a nursing home with 440 long-term patients.

With a 7-month-old baby, Barbara Askenazi said she planned to call her pediatrician to see whether her she and her 2½-year-old son Buddy, who mixes with plenty of children at nursery school, should get shots anyway.

"It just dumbfounds me that they can't figure out how to make enough," said Askenazi, 36. "People know the flu is coming, they know how dangerous it is, but there's always a shortage of vaccine."

The vaccine shortage will also have economic impacts. The Minnesota Visiting Nurse Agency counts on proceeds from its flu clinics to help fund some 80,000 home visits a year. It expected to receive 150,000 doses this year from Chiron.

"We had to cancel everything," said Mary Ann Blade, the agency's chief executive.

In a bad year, the stakes could be higher than just saving people from fever, headaches and a runny nose.

"What if you had 20 or 30 percent of your population not able to go to work or to school? It would affect the economy. It would affect, in a sense, our security," said Dr. Gregory Poland of the Mayo Clinic, who sits on a federal vaccine advisory board.

Health officials warned of shortages last Tuesday after one of the two companies that supply most of the nation's flu inoculations said it couldn't provide any. British authorities had suspended the license of Chiron Corp. because of problems at its vaccine plant in Liverpool. That chopped the nation's supply of flu vaccine in half.

When the news reached a meeting of vaccine experts Tuesday morning, "we were shocked and surprised, and then we got depressed, and then we just moved into problem-solving," recalled Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University.

"It doesn't help the firemen to get angry at the fire, you've got to go to work and put it out."

The basic problem is that "we've lost most of our domestic manufacturers" of flu vaccine, said Richard Webby at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. "When you're relying on two manufacturers ... and one goes down, you're up the creek."

Drug companies have pulled out of flu vaccine production because it's not very profitable and it's financially risky, health experts said.

One big problem is that demand for flu shots fluctuates from year to year as public interest waxes and wanes. Last season brought huge demand for a flu shot; the year before saw little interest, Poland said. But flu shots have to be made far in advance, so the manufacturers must rely on estimates and then they're "out there naked in the marketplace," said Schaffner.

If a flu shot isn't used during the season, it must be discarded. So companies generally throw away millions of doses a year, Poland said.

What's more, making vaccines - http://www.futureofeducation.com/main/search/search?q=vaccines requires massive capital investment and involves - http://www.examandinterviewtips.com/search?q=involves the costs of complying with federal regulations, and the market is relatively small, he said.

So what can be done to draw more companies into making flu vaccines?

One strategy would be to make demand higher and more reliable by getting more healthy adults to get flu shots regularly, Webby said. Between the publicity over last year's early flu season and the current concern that bird flu could spawn a lethal human pandemic, "flu certainly has had a relatively high profile the last couple years," Webby said. "All of this I think is certainly raising public awareness."

Other experts suggest having the government commit to buying a certain number of doses at a given price each year, buffering the uncertainty. Currently, most flu vaccine in the United States is bought by the private sector.

Not only could government buy more flu vaccine and promote flu shots more aggressively, it could also require health insurance companies to cover flu shots as well as other vaccines for adults, Schaffner said. A companion public program could provide flu shots for uninsured people, he suggested.

"It would create a huge new market."

By next year, a guaranteed government purchase might ensure that the three flu vaccine makers that now supply the nation remain in the business, Poland said. Besides the two major suppliers, another company makes the new inhaled vaccine, FluMist.

Poland said other measures also could improve the financial picture for manufacturing flu vaccines, such as easing the cost of complying with regulations and speeding up approval of new vaccines.

Schaffner said it's important for the government to keep focused on the problem.

"We need to not let our attention flag once this crisis is behind us," he said. "We need to keep our eye on the ball here."

The shortage has forced health officials to ration the available inoculations. The flu shots are now for 공주출장마사지 - https://www.anmapop.com/%ea%b3%b5%ec%a3%bc%ec%b6%9c%ec%9e%a5%ec%83%b5%cf... people 65 years of age and older, babies six to 23 months old, nursing home residents, pregnant women, day care workers and people with compromised immune systems. Healthy people are being asked to take a flu mist instead. That's still not enough to counter the rush or cut the lines down.

Vioxx, heavily marketed as an arthritis drug, was pulled from the market last week after its maker announced that a study showed it doubled the risk of heart problems. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said similar prescription drugs were safe.

On Wednesday, the European Medicines Agency in London announced it would review drugs similar to Vioxx. And researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine voiced their concerns as well with such drugs as Pfizer's popular Celebrex.

As CBS News Correspondent - https://www.rewards-insiders.marriott.com/search.jspa?q=Correspondent Elizabeth Kaledin reports, the study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine is now questioning the safety of other drugs in the same class...drugs known as COX 2 inhibitors..Dr. Garret FitzGerald has been studying the drugs for 경산출장마사지 - https://www.anmastar.com/%ea%b2%bd%ec%82%b0%ec%b6%9c%ec%9e%a5%ec%83%b5%c... 5 years.

"There have been suggestions in the past that indeed there are possibilities of cardiovascular problems with other members of this class,'' he told Kaledin.

The medical journal published two reports on the issue Wednesday on the Internet, ahead of their planned publication, because of their public health importance.

Studies done five years ago when Celebrex and Merck & Co.'s Vioxx were approved suggest that the same mechanism that inhibits inflammation and makes the drugs easier on the stomach than traditional painkillers also blocks a substance that prevents heart problems, FitzGerald, a University of Pennsylvania cardiologist who led the studies, which were designed by him but funded by the drug companies.

"I believe this is a class effect," meaning that the problem also applies to Celebrex and Pfizer's newer, similar drug, Bextra, which remain on the market.

He called on the FDA to change its advice to patients and doctors to reflect the new safety concerns. In a separate report also released by the medical journal, Dr. Eric Topol of the Cleveland Clinic chastises the FDA for not requiring Merck to do studies investigating heart problems with Vioxx when hints of them first appeared years ago.

Pfizer's medical director, Dr. Gail Cawkwell, insisted that its drugs are safe.

"The data for Celebrex is robust and exceeds, in the length of patients in studies and in the size of studies, the data Vioxx has," she said.

She called FitzGerald's contention "an interesting theory," but said, "there is no evidence" of increased risk of heart problems among the 75 million Americans who have taken Celebrex. Long-term studies are not yet available on Bextra, which was approved in 2001.

FDA officials did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

When Merck voluntarily withdrew Vioxx, FDA officials said heart problems were unique to that drug and that the mechanism underlying them wasn't known.

But FitzGerald and colleagues published two studies in 1999 and another in 2001 suggesting that by selectively blocking one of the two substances called prostaglandins that lead to inflammation, these so-called cox-2 inhibitors were sparing the stomach at the expense of the heart.

"There's a good prostaglandin and a bad prostaglandin - http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&q=bad%20prostaglandin as far as the heart is concerned," he explained.

Suppressing both, as older painkillers like aspirin and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDS do, helps the heart. But shutting down just the "good" one raises the risk of high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries and clotting, he reports.

The studies will be published in the Oct. 21 print edition of the medical journal.

SYDNEY -- A man was killed in a shark attack Tuesday at the popular tourist destination of Byron Bay on Australia's east coast despite a beachgoer's brave rescue attempt, police said.

The beachgoer, Mark Hickey, swam 15-20 meters (50-65 feet) feet from the shore of Clarkes Beach to retrieve the man, who had sustained severe wounds to his right leg, 전주출장안마 - https://www.opmassage.com/22-jeonjuuu Police Inspector Bobbie Cullen said.

The victim, a local man in his 50s whose name has not been released, received medical treatment on the beach but did not survive, Cullen said.

"A gentleman who was on the beach went out and located the gentleman and pulled him in," Cullen told reporters. "Absolutely it is (an extraordinary act of bravery) and we can only thank him for his efforts."

Hickey, a lawyer on vacation at Byron Bay, told Ten Network television news that he saw the shark and its bloodied victim and swam out to try to attempt a rescue as the shark attacked again.

#ByronBay lifeguards are conducting patrols after a fatal shark attack. Police to talk soon @tennewsqld pic.twitter.com/PxKkBW9HvR

"I just thought he may still be alive and I wanted to get him onto the shore," Hickey told the Australian.

He said he dragged the victim onto the beach and attempted to resuscitate him for 20 minutes, but the man had apparently bled to death in the water. Ten reported that the shark had bitten through the victim's wetsuit - http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/victim%27s%20wetsuit on his upper right thigh, tearing off much of his leg.

The leg wounds were being examined to identify the size and species of the shark.

The victim's wife was on the beach at the time of the attack, according to the Australian.

Cullen said the crew of a rescue helicopter spotted what appeared to be a great white shark in the area after the suspected attack, but had lost sight of it. She said all Byron Bay beaches would be closed for 24 hours due to the potential danger.

Byron Bay is a renowned surfing location near Cape Byron, the most easterly - http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/search/easterly point of the Australian mainland, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Sydney.

The death is the first fatal attack in Australia since April 3, when a 63-year-old woman was taken by a 3-to-4-meter (10-to-13-foot) shark near the village of Tathra, 340 kilometers (210 miles) south of Sydney.

Although sharks are common off Australia's coasts, the country has averaged fewer than two fatal attacks per year in recent decades. But fatal attacks are becoming more common. Two men were killed in shark attacks off the east and west coasts in the space of a week in November last year. They were the only fatalities in 2013.

SYDNEY -- A man was killed in a shark attack Tuesday at the popular tourist destination of Byron Bay on Australia's east coast despite a beachgoer's brave rescue attempt, police said.

The beachgoer, Mark Hickey, swam 15-20 meters (50-65 feet) feet from the shore of Clarkes Beach to retrieve the man, who had sustained severe wounds to his right leg, Police Inspector Bobbie Cullen said.

The victim, a local man in his 50s whose name has not been released, received medical treatment - http://www.healthable.org/?s=treatment on the beach but did not survive, Cullen said.

"A gentleman who was on the beach went out and located the gentleman and pulled him in," Cullen told reporters. "Absolutely it is (an extraordinary act of bravery) and we can only thank him for his efforts."

Hickey, a lawyer on vacation at Byron Bay, told Ten Network television news that he saw the shark and its bloodied victim and swam out to try to attempt a rescue as the shark attacked again.

#ByronBay lifeguards are conducting patrols after a fatal shark attack. Police to talk soon @tennewsqld pic.twitter.com/PxKkBW9HvR

"I just thought he may still be alive and I wanted to get him onto the shore," Hickey told the Australian.

He said he dragged the victim onto the beach and attempted to resuscitate him for 20 minutes, but the man had apparently bled to death in the water. Ten reported that the shark had bitten through the victim's wetsuit on his upper right thigh, tearing off much of his leg.

The leg wounds were being examined to identify the size and species of the shark.

The victim's wife was on the beach at the time of the attack, according to the Australian.

Cullen said the crew of a rescue helicopter spotted what appeared to be a great white shark in the area after the suspected attack, but had lost sight of it. She said all Byron Bay beaches would be closed for 24 hours due to the potential danger.

Byron Bay is a renowned surfing location near Cape Byron, 김제출장안마 - https://www.opmassage.com/21-gimjee the most easterly point of the Australian mainland, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Sydney.

The death is the first fatal attack in Australia since April 3, when a 63-year-old woman was taken by a 3-to-4-meter (10-to-13-foot) shark near the village of Tathra, 340 kilometers (210 miles) south of Sydney.

Although sharks are common off Australia's coasts, the country has averaged fewer than two fatal attacks per year in recent decades. But fatal attacks are becoming more common. Two men were killed in shark attacks - http://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=usagov&query=shark%20attacks off the east and west coasts in the space of a week in November last year. They were the only fatalities in 2013.