H3 Seasonal Flu "Vaccine Is Working" in Washington

    Across the Region, College Students Are Felled by Bug

By Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 14, 2008; B03



Andrew Friedson was feeling achy one recent night and turned in early. The University of Maryland senior got up the next day and forced himself to go to class but soon had to face the incontrovertible truth: He was sick. And he had lots of company.

Flu has been diagnosed in more than 400 College Park students over the past few weeks. And more than 400 students at the University of Virginia. And about 30 at George Mason.

Universities across the Washington region are coping with an outbreak of influenza and gastrointestinal viruses that is driving a record number of students to campus health centers.

"It's easy to get sick at school," said Friedson, 22, who ended up spending 2 1/2 days in bed last week. "Anytime you have a situation where people live and work so closely together, everyone is going to get sick if one person does."

U-Va. officials say this is the worst student flu outbreak on their campus in at least a decade. The outbreak at U-Md. is the worst in three years, officials there said. And at GMU, campus doctors are reporting a 25 to 30 percent increase in flu cases this year over most years. They have seen 50 students in the past 29 days, with 18 of the 31 who were tested for influenza coming up positive, a spokesman said.

"I think it was the perfect storm," said James C. Turner, executive director of U-Va.'s Elson Student Health Center, where 437 cases had been diagnosed from mid-January through Tuesday. "All of our students were returning to school, and there was sorority rush and fraternity rush. Someone brought it in, and with all that socializing, it exploded across our campus."

According to Turner, the prevalent strain at U-Va. is influenza A (H3), which causes a respiratory illness that includes high fever, aches, headache and cough. Some students are reporting vomiting, he said, but that is a result of a gastrointestinal virus common in winter and not influenza A. Some of the students have strep throat.

Ten percent of the cases diagnosed at the health center have been in students who had received a flu vaccination, Turner said. But the attack rate among the unvaccinated is many-fold higher, he said, "so the vaccine is working."

At U-Md., health officials are telling students that an antiviral medication can lessen the length and severity of the symptoms, if given within the first 24 hours of onset.

Schools across the country are also experiencing outbreaks. Some have taken to distributing masks to try to stop the flu's spread. Some have also run out of the antiviral medication Tamiflu.

The flu also has been an equal-opportunity virus. Faculty and university staff members have been hit, too.

Tracy Schario, director of media relations at George Washington University, said that as much as 30 percent of those who work in her office have been out sick, each for three to five days, over the past few weeks. She was out, too, spending four days in bed over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.

Robin Lanzi, an assistant professor at Georgetown University, said she is feeling pretty fortunate at the moment. She walks into her classes these days, and up to 15 percent of her enrolled students are out sick. So far, neither she nor her five sons, ages 5 months to 10 years, has had so much as a sneeze.

"But I hesitate to say it because you know what will happen when I do," Lanzi said.