State Health official says Flu not here yet

Congratulations…you don’t have the flu. There are plenty of people walking around…or staying home these days with a bug: a cold, a virus, the sneezes and sniffles and ailments ranging from uncomfortable to explosive. But none of them is the flu. At least, not the official influenza of winter, any of several strains health officials expect to start sending people to the hospital any day now. A few kinds of the virus are chosen each year, from dozens that turn up around the globe, as being most likely to spread across the U-S in the season when colds and flu peak…and those chosen strains are used to make the flu vaccine that’s had people lining up this fall for shots at doctors’ offices and temporary inoculation stations. Spokesman Kevin Teale in Iowa’s department of public health says there haven’t been any cases reported by doctors or hospitals that would trigger official recognition of the flu season yet.