80,000 people died of the flu last winter in the United States

NEW YORK – Some 80,000 Americans died of the flu and its complications last winter – the heaviest toll of all deaths in at least four decades.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday night with the Associated Press.

The influenza experts knew that it was a very bad season, but at least one found the size of the estimate surprising.

"It's huge," said Dr. William Schaffner, vaccine expert at Vanderbilt University. The count was almost twice what health officials had previously considered a bad year, he said.

In recent years, deaths related to influenza have ranged from about 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC.

Last fall and winter, the United States experienced one of the worst flu seasons in its history. It has been caused by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, especially in young children and the elderly.

The season peaked in early February and ended in late March.

Pushing a bad year, the flu vaccine was not working very well. Experts say vaccination is still worth it because it reduces the severity of disease and saves lives.

"I would like to see more people get vaccinated," Redfield told AP at an event in New York. "We lost 80,000 people last year because of the flu."

CDC officials do not have exact figures on the number of people who die each year from the flu. Influenza is so common that not all cases of influenza are reported and flu is not always on death certificates. The CDC therefore uses periodically revised statistical models to make estimates.

Fatal complications of the flu can include pneumonia, stroke, and heart attacks.

CDC officials have qualified the 80,000 preliminary figures, and they could be slightly revised. But they said that there should not be a decline.

It overshadows the estimates for each flu season going back to the winter of 1976-1977. Estimates for several previous seasons were not readily available.

Last winter, however, was not the worst flu season. The 1918 influenza pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, historians say.

It's not easy to compare flu seasons throughout history, in part because the country's population is changing. There are more Americans – and older Americans – today than in the past, said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the CDC's influenza expert.

US health officials on Thursday held a media event in Washington, DC, to highlight the importance of flu vaccines, no matter what type of influenza is in circulation this winter.

And what will be the situation? So far, the flu detected is a less serious strain, and early signs indicate that the vaccine is on track, said Jernigan.

The vaccine composition has been modified this year to try to better protect against the strains expected.

"We do not know what's going to happen, but we're seeing more encouraging signs than at the beginning of last year," said Jernigan.