Vaccine begins to arrive as flu season nears

Remember the seasonal flu?

The last typical season was the winter of 2008-09. The pattern was upended by an out-of-season pandemic flu the following spring and fall, and hardly any flu at all last winter.

Now the best educated guess by public-health experts is that influenza will next appear in a more-or-less normal season that contains several strains, including the so-called swine flu.

And vaccine is starting to arrive.

Several retail drugstore chains are already offering vaccine or plan to start soon. (For locations and eligibility, go to http://go.philly.com/flu).

Most county health departments in the Philadelphia region have begun receiving vaccine, and all plan clinics in the fall. Shipments to private practices are harder to measure. But all five manufacturers reported two to three weeks ago that they had already started delivering what is anticipated to be a record 150 million to 180 million doses, vaccine expert William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine said Tuesday.

In a conference call with reporters, Schaffner delivered a message that is likely to be repeated many times in the coming months by public-health officials who worry that confusion and flu fatigue - the verbal kind - could get in the way of prevention.

"Influenza can put you in the hospital," said Schaffner, an adviser to federal agencies on flu policy. "It's not too early to get vaccinated."

Emphasizing the point was Serese Marotta of Dayton, Ohio, whose son - Joseph, 5, with no preexisting health conditions - died of the new H1N1 flu last October, nine days after he threw up on a school bus.

He had been hospitalized almost immediately, was diagnosed with pneumonia and later influenza, and appeared to be over the worst of it when, in the midst of a conversation with his mother, "his eyes rolled back and then the monitor went off," Marotta said. She said the official cause of death was "catastrophic intestinal rupture" as a result of the flu virus.