Influenza Informative Speech

Although I devote some of my articles to telling you not to worry so much about some diseases or other risks, influenza is one thing you actually should worry about. It’s terrible; it’s also far too common. Influenza, commonly called the flu, spreads easily. You can catch it from someone who coughs, sneezes or even talks to you from up to six feet away. You can infect others a day before you show any symptoms, and up to a week after becoming sick. Children can pass along the virus for even longer than that. Influenza is not a reportable disease, so its prevalence must be estimated. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believes that, since 2010, between 9.2 million and 35.6 million people have come down with the flu in the United States each year.
That means that in a bad year, more than one in every 10 people in the United States might get it.
Many of those people end up in the hospital. In a good year, we might see as few as 114,000 people hospitalized with flu-associated illnesses. In a bad year, that number rises to more than 700,000. In 2014, more than 57,000 people died of influenza/pneumonia. It was the eighth-most common cause of death, behind diabetes (just under 80,000 deaths). It’s also the only cause of death in the top 10 that could be significantly reduced by a vaccine. Lowering risks of heart disease, cancer or Alzheimer’s are much, much harder to do. In 1995, the worst year of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, fewer than 51,000 people died of it. In 2014, just over 6,700 deaths were attributable directly to H.I.V. Yet it is H.I.V., not the flu, that people dread far more. Because the flu is so common, we tend to minimize its importance. Consider the contrast with how the United States responded to Ebola a few years ago. We had a handful of infections, almost none of them contracted here. One person died. Yet some states considered travel bans, and others started quarantining
people. Worldwide, just over 10,000 people died in the 2014-15 West African outbreak of Ebola: a relatively new, frighteningly contagious illness that people feared could become a global pandemic. It’s not surprising that it got a lot of attention. Yet the tens of thousands who died of influenza in the United States the same year barely made the news. It’s possible that so many adults ignore the danger because it seldom affects them directly. Most of the hospitalizations and deaths occur among children and older people. The rates of hospitalization of those less than 5 years of age are twice that of adults under 50. The rates among those 65 or older can be 10 times that of other adults. Almost two-thirds of deaths are among older people. So much of this is preventable. The C.D.C. estimated that in the 2015-2016 flu season, the flu shot prevented more than five million cases of the flu, about 2.5 million medical visits and more than 70,000 hospitalizations. It was also estimated that it prevented 3,000 deaths.