# 2023
Maryn McKenna has an excellent review of the 2007-2008 flu season in her article just published in the Annals Of Emergency Medicine.
Maryn, as most of you know, is the award winning science writer and author of Beating Back The Devil, who writes frequently for CIDRAP and who has her own blogsite called Superbug.
Volume 51, Issue 6, Pages 739-741 (June 2008)
Vaccine Mishap, Flu Outbreak Overwhelm EDs, Highlight Lack of Surge Capacity
Maryn McKenna (Special Contributor to Annals News & Perspective)
Article Outline
• No Matter Where in the Country You Went, This Flu Season Was Dire
• Ineffective Vaccine
• Crowding, the Real Pandemic
• Bracing for Disaster
• References
• Copyright
Dr. Rita Cydulka knew it was a bad flu season when she ran out of alphabet.
“Like most emergency rooms, we're overcrowded and we have to use hall beds; we use letters to designate them, and we usually go from A to something like H,” said Cydulka, who is associate professor and vice-chair of emergency medicine at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. “But in the height of February, we went from A to Z. And then we started again, and we went from AA to ZZ.”
Cydulka had a lot of company. After a slow ramp-up, the 2007-2008 flu season hit the US with unusual force. Flu was “widespread,” the most severe measure, in 49 of the 51 US public health jurisdictions in the third week of February, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.1 In emergency departments (EDs), perennial sentinels for flu's impact, “widespread” did not begin to describe the problem: Talking about it, physicians around the country use words like “severe” and “slammed.”
