The United States estimates that 80,000 Americans died of the flu and its complications last winter

NEW YORK — The US government estimates that 80,000 Americans died of the flu and its complications last winter – the highest number of 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, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to – in the worst year – 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. It was late March, although some flu continued to circulate.

Pushing a bad year, the flu vaccine was not working very well. However, experts say that vaccination is still worthwhile because it makes diseases less serious 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.

The CDC has qualified the 80,000 preliminary figures, and they can 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 flu pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, say historians.