Orange County Is Fighting Flu Cases at a Feverish Pace

The flu and other respiratory viruses have attacked Orange County with fury during the holiday season, filling emergency rooms with feverish, wheezing patients and possibly leading to the death Tuesday of a 6-year-old Costa Mesa boy.

Employers said Wednesday that the bugs have struck their work forces, and a county Health Care Agency official said several schools reported high rates of absenteeism just before Christmas vacation.

“We’re getting hit pretty hard,” said Dr. Mark K. Langdorf, acting director of the emergency room at the UC Irvine Medical Center. “In terms of upper respiratory infections, we’ve seen 30 cases yesterday and 30 the day before. . . . Normally we would see five. It’s quite a dramatic increase.”

Los Angeles County is in the midst of a “moderate to severe” flu season, according to Dr. Shirley Fannin, director of disease control programs for the county Department of Health Services. “It looks like a heavier season than we’ve had in about eight or 10 years,” she said.

That assessment was not based on an exact counting of influenza cases, which are not reported individually to the health department, but on general reports of increased cases from schools and physicians. Fannin said that one Santa Monica elementary school was briefly closed in early December because of influenza. Other schools, she said, have reported flu-related absentee rates as high as 30%, more than three times the usual level.

Throughout the region and the nation, more cases of influenza A have been cropping up, said Kathryn Rekrut, virology supervisor with Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California Regional Virology Laboratory, which tracks flu strains and other respiratory illnesses for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Rekrut said she suspects the increase may be more closely related to the fact that doctors now have drugs to treat flu symptoms, so they are sending more specimens out for laboratory testing.

The Costa Mesa boy was found dead on his bedroom floor Tuesday morning, three days after he began to suffer flu-like symptoms, the Orange County coroner’s office said.

The youngster, an active child who enjoyed baseball and karate, had no history of serious medical problems, said a coroner’s investigator who asked not to be identified. The boy’s mother had what she described as the flu last month and his younger brother had it a week ago.

“This little one was just sick on Friday,” the investigator said. “He felt kind of icky and didn’t eat his favorite . . . food.”

His parents gave him Tylenol and cough medicine, the investigator said. Early Tuesday, he rose from his bed and removed his clothes, apparently because he was hot, then lay on the floor of his bedroom, she said. When his sister came in to put a cover over him, she noticed he was not breathing. When paramedics arrived about 8:30 a.m., he was dead.

An autopsy on the boy, whose name was not released, is pending, but coroner’s officials believe he was suffering from a virus. County health officials could not be reached to discuss the case, but other physicians said it would be very uncommon for an otherwise healthy child to die from the common flu.

Infectious disease specialists do not attribute the onslaught of patients exclusively to influenza. There are almost certainly more cases of influenza type A this year than last, they said. That type of the virus can lead to secondary bacterial infections.

But doctors in Orange County say they are treating more patients for a range of airborne respiratory infections. Several of these cause similar symptoms to those of the flu, including scratchy throat, dry cough, fever and headache.

Among the other viruses are respiratory syncytial virus, which is particularly virulent in children under 6 months old, and others known as parainfluenza and adenovirus. The diseases often cannot be distinguished from one another without laboratory tests.

“This hospital is very busy,” said Dr. David J. Lang, director of infectious diseases and medical education at Children’s Hospital of Orange County. “There are people stacked up waiting for rooms,” mainly because of respiratory illnesses.

Doctors say that in most cases, patients need only follow the advice their grandmothers used to give them: Get plenty of rest, drink lots of fluids and try not to cough and sneeze on other people. But if symptoms do not abate after three days or so, or if breathing becomes labored, it is important to seek medical attention quickly.

Although it is best to receive an influenza vaccination in the fall, before flu season starts, experts said it is not too late to get one now. The shots are recommended for elderly people and those who have compromised immune systems or chronic heart or respiratory problems.

For patients whose symptoms do not abate, there are antiviral and antibiotic drugs that can help tame the illness and its complications.