And with it, of course,
filling like fall around here,
it's also the start of flu season.
We wanna bring in Doctor David
Winter from Baylor Scott and White
Health to talk about some common
illnesses this time of year.
Good morning, doctor winter.
Good morning to Shar. Good to be with
you. Absolutely. Let's talk about flu first.
Have you seen any flu cases yet?
I have seen flu.
I saw in the last week. In my part,
my partners have seen it also.
So it's coming. We worry this may be
a really bad flu season this year.
It spread pretty rapidly in
Europe just a month ago.
And then last summer,
Australia's winter season,
they had a huge outbreak.
So we think it's going to be
really bad flu season this year.
So if you hadn't had a flu shot,
you might want to consider
getting one right now.
They do work.
And what are the predictions with
COVID this fall? Are we going
to see another surge with it?
Yeah. The big concerns,
Ashara is, is 2 things #1.
The immunity of America as a whole is waning,
is declining because if you had COVID,
you have some protection.
But if that was six months
ago or if you had a flu,
I had a COVID shot six months ago,
that's a little bit too long.
And your antibodies tend to decline.
So that's decreased what we
call herd immunity. Second,
we have these new variants that are out.
They're in Europe right now, BQ .1,
BQ dot 1.1. Is the other one.
And they actually now are in Northeast
America, New York, New Jersey.
It was about 2% two weeks ago,
up to 20% now.
So new more contagious variants.
The good news is the new vaccine,
the bivalent COVID vaccine,
does work against them,
but new variants coming,
a lot of waning immunity.
It may be a lot of surges coming up.
We're worried about that this year.
Oh boy, something to be mindful of.
And you know, a lot of folks even this
time of year start to get together.
With the holiday season approaching,
what should we do to help prevent
the spread of? Infections.
Yeah. I think you ought to consider
who you're going to be with.
If you have friends or relatives
that are old, maybe frail,
if some of them have illnesses and make
them more susceptible to infections,
be careful around those folks.
If you have head congestion,
sore throat, cough, fever,
you might have to stay away from them.
We may tolerate those
viruses better than they do.
And some of those folks get seriously
ill and they're even deaths with that.
So a lot of viruses circulating right now.
You got COVID,
you got influenza,
you got respiratory syncytial virus.
We call that RSV.
And these bad boys are waiting for
us all to get together so they can
jump around and spread further.
Nothing to be aware of right now.
Yeah. And I wanna talk about that last bad
boy that you mentioned, RSV infections.
It's something that we've been talking
about in many of our health stories,
many reports of it in North
Texas tell us about that disease.
Yeah, in adults, tashar,
it's just like a common cold,
two or three days of head congestion,
sore throat, not a bad illness,
but a young kids to children,
two years and less 1-2 years old,
they don't do, don't do very well at all.
And it's been a huge outbreak
of that around the country,
particularly in North Texas. In fact,
Cook County is just full of them right now.
Just this week they say they've had
1000 new cases every day over there.
Those kids don't do well and the older
folks don't do well with this either.
There's no good treatment,
so you want to try to avoid it.
Avoiding these the same
way we did with COVID.
Masking, distancing.
Don't be kissing those babies.
And there's no vaccine right now.
So RSV is a bad disease for young kids
and older folks and it's out there.
Also a lot of viruses.
This is the fall season
coming up and get it ready.
We're going to have a little
bit of roll this year.
Doctor Winner Real quickly.
Ebola broken out in Africa.
Any cases yet in America?
No, not yet. And thank goodness the
US government is actually making sure
that if anybody comes from Uganda,
they can only go to five airports
where they're being screened.
None in this area.
It's Atlanta, Chicago, New York,
New Jersey, Washington, DC there.
If you've been to Uganda,
they're going to keep you in isolation.
They make sure you don't have it.
So none here, but it's still going up.
They say there's 24 deaths now
in Uganda and Central Africa,
maybe more than that.
We think that's an underestimation.
And this can be a real lethal illness,
a lot of contagion.
And the death rate can be as
high as 90% in prior epidemics,
so we gotta watch this carefully.
But right now,
none so far in
America. Absolutely.
Doctor wins are always so good
to talk to you and catch up
on the latest health issues.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you. Have a good day. You too.