The researchers leveraged a real-time computerized biosurveillance system linking five diverse health-care settings in Greater Boston, and examined medical visits from 2000 to 2004. Children aged 3 to 4 clearly led influenza epidemics, presenting with flu-like respiratory illness as early as late September. Children aged 0-2 began arriving a week or two later, while older children first arrived in October and adults began arriving only in November.
Moreover, flu-like illness in children under age 5, compared with all other age groups, was the most predictive of pneumonia and influenza deaths in the general population as determined from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database. Visits by children aged 0-2 provided the best prediction of mortality, but those of 3- and 4-year-olds followed close behind, suggesting that preschoolers, not just infants and toddlers, are important spreaders of flu to vulnerable groups.
"The data make sense because preschools and daycares, with their close quarters, are hotbeds of infection," says Dr. John Brownstein, the paper's lead author and a faculty member of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. "The data suggest that when kids are sneezing, the elderly begin to die. Three- and 4-year-olds are sentinels that allow us to focus our surveillance systems."
Influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans each year. Previous studies have shown
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Contact: Rachel Pugh
rachel.pugh@childrens.harvard.edu
617-355-6420
Children's Hospital Boston
29-Sep-2005