Why subclade K' could make for a nasty flu season
thehill.com

... A new strain of the flu called subclade K could make for a particularly nasty flu season across the country, according to public health experts.

The strain already caused Japan to declare an influenza epidemic. The United Kingdom's flu season started a month earlier than usual, a trend also playing out across the Atlantic.

U.S. flu cases have already reached numbers typically seen in December, said Cameron Wolfe, a professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist at Duke University.

"We're here mid-November seeing the beginning of an uptick that's actually mirrored by what we've seen overseas," Wolfe said.

"It's not necessarily showing any signs of being more severe, I think it does look as if it has sort of escaped some of our prior immunity, and therefore we'd expect more cases, and maybe that's why we're seeing them more early in the season than what we would usually see."

Subclade K is a variant of the H3N2 influenza, which has dominated past flu seasons and cocirculated with an H1N1 last year.

H3N2 variants tend to cause more severe symptoms like a high fever, fatigue and severe body aches in comparison with H1N1 variants, which tend to be more mild, according to the Doctors Diagnostic Center. ...