Flu season hits Southern Alberta hard

The icy grip of winter may have loosened a bit, but Calgary is still in the hold of flu season.

Alberta Health Services Medical Officer of Health Dr. Judy MacDonald said we won’t know until mid-January how effective the vaccine has been, but she added they know from history that it doesn’t perform well with this particular strain of Influenza, A(H3).

“It’s just the nature of the influenza virus, this particular virus and the difficulty, the challenges with getting a vaccine to match it,” she said.

“It is notorious for undergoing changes, sometimes minor ones, sometimes a little bit bigger and so just in circulating in people it changes,” continued MacDonald.

For that reason, it can change a lot from the time the vaccine is cooked up to the time people get it, making the flu shot less effective.

Even predicting what the dominant strain will be each year is difficult. It takes a whole team of people gathering data from around the world.

“All of that data is actually accessed by the World Health Organization and they’re the ones that sit down twice a year, so coming up in February, we expect them to sit down and predict what we’re going to be seeing for next fall,” explained MacDonald.

The flu shot will be available until the end of March.

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