“Early start may mean bad flu season ahead,” reads the headline in the Seattle Times, but so far the news in Washington is good — that’s a national wire story. The CDC’s flu map shows the worst outbreaks occurring on the East Coast — and Alaska. Here in Washington State, the flu is rated “sporadic,” below epidemic levels and tracking closely with the rate of the past two years at this time.
Still, the turning point may come as early as four to five weeks, as it did two years ago. Levels of immunity and good behavior (i.e., not passing the flu along to the office) can make all the difference.
On that note, more good news. The majority of confirmed cases, nationally and in Washington, are of the influenza A H3 variety, and the head of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, says this year’s flu shot is protecting well against those strains of the bug. (So far, the incidence of pertussis remains low, too.) Thanks to the state’s childhood vaccine program, a shot is free for anyone under 19 years old. (This map will list the vaccination providers near you.)
There’s still time to get a jump on the prevention; Accuweather’s flu forecast for Seattle claims this cool, rainy pattern doesn’t impact flu risk.
Actor Chris O’Donnell got a Fluzone(R) Intradermal vaccine, and he seems just fine. Picture of health. (PRNewsFoto/Sanofi Pasteur)
Seattle is one of the five cities nationally chosen for the the Fluzone Intradermal Coop de Quill VacciNation Tour, and by Seattle, Sanofi Pasteur means Kirkland. Their Coop de Quill car, which features a “supersized rooftop 3D structure of the Fluzone Intradermal vaccine,” will pull up at a Kirkland Walgreen’s (12405 NE 85th St.) this Monday, September 24, from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.
>>King County residents, go here to see who’s dispensing flu vaccines locally.
“Intradermal” is fancy medical term meaning “you won’t pass out when you see the needle we use.” It’s a mosquito-sized wisp of a thing that stops just under the skin, reducing the chance of muscle soreness. In fact, the most common after-effects are mosquito-bite-sounding: “redness, firmness, swelling, and itching.” (There’s also a nasal spray, if you’re between the ages of 2 and 49.)
The tour means to “educate adults 18 through 64 years of age about the seriousness of influenza and vaccine options available.” For instance, did you know that the majority of your neighbors are passively trying to infect you with the flu? During the 2010-11 flu season, only 36 percent of Washington adults 18-to-64 got immunized. (Maybe it’s time to break out the “I’m Immunized!” buttons, so you know who’s civic-minded, like the “I Gave Blood!” people.)
In King County, the flu immunization rate for all adults over 18 ( for latest year 2010) was 44 percent. 18-to-44-year-olds are the worst offenders; at about middle age, a more lively sense of mortality seems to have a salutary effect. But even so, only about 45 percent of the 45-to-64 age group bother to get a shot.
This despite the fact that, for the past two years, the flu vaccine has been right on the money when it comes to targeting the flu strains out there. It’s not perfect protection, by any means, but last flu season it was about 60-percent effective. (If you could walk into a casino and gamble 60-percent effectively, you would soon not be allowed into casinos.)
For the 3,000 to 49,000 people who die from it in the U.S. annually, the flu is no laughing matter. The 226,000 who are hospitalized because of its complications probably don’t chuckle over it, either. At Walgreen’s, the price locally is $31.99. Think of it as $16 for you, $16 for the good of everyone around.
A little over a month since whooping cough crossed the epidemic threshold in Washington State, political officials seem persuaded that the nagging cough is not going to go away on its own. Last week, Governor Gregoire announced that she’d be making available, along with $210,000 already allocated from the Department of Health, an extra $90,000 from the emergency fund to combat pertussis.
The funding will “strengthen public awareness efforts about the need for vaccination,” and more will stand ready in case the state needs to buy more vaccinations. Thanks to an okay from the CDC, federal funds will provide uninsured or underinsured adults with more than 27,000 doses of pertussis vaccine (the funds were originally intended for a range of immunizations).
The whooping cough epidemic as of 4/28/2012 (WA DOH)
To get ahead of the outbreak, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Washington State Department of Health (DOH) Secretary Mary Selecky want more help from the CDC than that. They’re asking for a team of disease investigators–Epidemic Aid – or “Epi-Aid” – investigators and epidemiologists–to help contain the cough. “In my 13 years as secretary this is the first time I’ve had to use the word ‘epidemic’ about disease in our state,” Selecky said.
Nearly three-quarters (819 of 1,132) this year’s reported cases of pertussis are from Snohomish, Skagit, Pierce, King, and Clark counties. Only twelve counties have remained free of whooping cough reports. Skagit is far and away the leader in the rate of infection, followed by Jefferson County, though in terms of absolute number of cases, Snohomish comes in second.
Chart indicating how pertussis has surpassed epidemic baseline in 2012
There are always winners and losers. Our recently dissolved state tourism board has dodged a negative publicity bullet. “Say WA“? How about “Say AHHHHH”? How would you like to persuade families to vacation in the whooping cough outbreak state? Seattle’s cruise ship industry can’t love this.
End of March 2012, the Washington State Department of Health announced that, technically speaking, whooping cough (pertussis) had reached epidemic levels. Now, almost a month later, the news is actually worse: “There have been a total of 1,008 cases reported statewide through week 16, compared to 110 reported cases in 2011 during the same time period.”
If that trend continues, for a total of 3,000 cases in 2012, it would mark the worst outbreak in 60 years in Washington, reports KING TV.
27 Washington counties have reported pertussis activity, with only twelve escaping it so far. As expected, babies are most susceptible: “Seventy-one infants under one year of age were reported as having whooping cough and eighteen of them were hospitalized. Of those hospitalized, fourteen (78%) were very young (three months of age or younger).” In terms of absolute cases, the leading age group is from five to thirteen years of age, with 449 children with whooping cough.
MyNorthwest.com’s Josh Kerns notes that “vaccines are available to all Washington children under 19 years old through health care provider offices participating in the state’s Childhood Vaccine Program.” By middle school and high school, the original pertussis vaccine will have started to wear off, so a booster shot is probably a good idea.
As always, California got there first. CNN notes, in their earlier story about Washington’s pertussis epidemic:
In 2010, whooping cough infected 9,000 people and killed 10 infants in California, in the worst outbreak in the state in 60 years. California passed a law requiring all students in the 7th to 12th grade to get the Tdap booster shot.
You can’t say you weren’t warned. The state’s department of health has been issuing alarms about the rise in pertussis incidence for some time; The SunBreak published a story last year on the trend, in mentioning the state’s leadership in parent-excused vaccinations. By February of this year, it was already clear it was going to be bad.
On September 21, 2011, the state of Georgia executed convicted murderer Troy Davis, despite the fact that over the years–police officer Mark MacPhail was killed in 1989–multiple witnesses had recanted their testimony, saying that Georgia police had pressured them into testifying.
On March 17, Amnesty International USA, Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Western Washington Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Safe and Just Alternatives are uniting to present “Troy Davis: The Human Face of the Death Penalty,” held at the Keystone Church (5 p.m., 5019 Keystone Place North) in Seattle. The event is free, but donations for the Davis family will be accepted.
It’s a reminder that Washington State enforces the death penalty (by lethal injection and hanging)–as recently as September 2010 when Cal Brown, convicted of stabbing and strangling to death 21-year-old Holly Washa in 1991, was put to death. The event’s co-sponsoring organizations all argue for replacing the death penalty with life without parole
The evening is built around video footage, photos, and stories about Troy and his family, provided by Seattle documentary filmmaker and author Jen Marlowe (interviewed previously). Marlowe met over the years with Troy Davis and his family, working to prevent his execution, and will talk about Davis’s case and about the human impact that can’t be summed up in a screaming headline.
Marlowe says she wants to talk in particular about the effects the death penalty has on families, and warns that she will have footage from the vigil outside the prison in Jackson the night of Troy’s execution.
Sarah Craft, from Equal Justice USA, will pick up on Davis’s legacy, as encapsulated by his recognition in TIME Magazine’s People Who Mattered in 2011. In his final statement, he asked for his defenders to “Continue to fight this fight” against the death penalty.
“We need to remember the death penalty is not unique to Georgia,” says Craft, who will talk about efforts in Washington State to lead a legislative effort for repeal. (Like many other states, Washington has had its problems with making death sentences stick. The Seattle Times brought you the story back in 2003:
When the state wanted to execute Benjamin Harris, they said he was perfectly sane. When his conviction was overturned, they locked him up for being crazy. And recently, the state considered Harris sane enough to ask him to testify as a prosecution witness in court.
Such is the unusual tale of Benjamin Harris, the only person ever exonerated from Washington’s death row.
Oregon’s governor, John Kitzhaber, placed a moratorium on all executions in November of last year, saying the state’s capital punishment system is too broken to defend; here is Governor Gregoire’s lawyerly statement refusing to commute Cal Brown’s death sentence to life without parole.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has repeatedly made time to hear arguments for abolishing the death penalty the past three years. Publicola has more on that history, and the “surprising” lack of pushback to Sen. Ed Murray’s bill. Craft is hopeful for a House hearing next year.
Marlowe understands that people have mixed feelings about the death penalty’s application. That, she says, is what the evening is about, exploring what it means to allow the state to kill someone, and whether mixed feelings should be a call to action.
Washington State's Unemployment Rates through October 2011
Here’s a riddle for you. Washington State’s unemployment rate is tracked to the tenth of a percentage point (though whether the data supports that level of precision is arguable). It has “fallen” for seven out of ten months in 2011, yet in January the (preliminary) rate was 9.1 percent and in October it was 9.0. Is this a new instance of Zeno’s Paradox?
Most recently, it fell in the Seattle Times, Seattlepi.com, and Puget Sound Business Journal. (In fairness, “dipped slightly” in the Times.) Still, common sense tells you that somehow you are not getting the whole picture from the headlines. Nothing can fall that often, without going up, and yet remain within a tenth of percentage point of its beginning. The long-term picture is of an economy that, while not declining, is failing to gain ground in hiring.
I hesitate to call it a conspiracy so much as dogged optimism, but what you almost never read in the headline is “Revised Rate Adjusted Upward for Seventh Time”–I don’t actually recall that ever being in the headline, honestly, but to be on the safe side, I’ll add that “almost never.” But that’s how it works. The lagging revised rate corrects the preliminary rate upward, and then the succeeding month’s rate can be said to have “fallen,” even if, comparing preliminary rate to preliminary rate, you have exactly the same number, month to month.
This matters because on nights when Occupy Seattle blocks bridges with the aid of union members, as a protest against job losses, some fuming in their cars may be questioning whether things are that bad. Surely, after seven months of falling unemployment, things are getting better? And such complacency is best avoided, whether you think snarling commutes is ultimately helpful or not. So far this year, the state has lost 8,800 public sector jobs (5,400 being state workers).
In October alone, “Professional and business services lost an estimated 7,000 jobs over the month, more than any other sector. The transportation, warehousing and utilities sector lost an estimated 1,100 jobs and the retail sector lost an estimated 1,000 jobs,” says the ESD.
It’s not all gloom and doom. Delightfully, in fall, the state also sees a seasonal bump in what it calls “apple employment,” this year up 8.7 percent. And as the state’s chief economist Arun Raha notes in his November update to Washington’s revenue forecast:
We expect Washington’s economy to outperform the U.S. in the recovery. Boeing and Microsoft are both hiring again. The aerospace sector has added 9,100 jobs since May 2010, which is 3,100 more than the number lost during the recession, while the software sector has added 1,900 jobs since December 2009, making up for most of the 2,500 jobs lost during the recession. The state’s farming and export sectors are also doing well. Washington exports were up 29% in the third quarter of this year compared to the previous year.
Boeing’s commercial airplane division has just leased 45,000 square feet of space in downtown Seattle’s Russell Investments Center. These are the kinds of developments that have stanched the bleeding of job loss.
When Raha surveys the national scene, he sees this stagnant hiring situation writ large. You may be surprised to hear that the U.S.’s real gross domestic product is “back up to its pre-recession peak,” but that the nation has managed to do this with 6.8 million fewer jobs.
Growth in jobs has been excruciatingly slow in this recovery. The economy added just 80,000 net new jobs in October, although the previous two months were revised up a combined 102,000. Cutbacks in the public sector continue to weigh down the employment recovery with cuts of 24,000 across all levels of government. Almost 14 million people remained unemployed.
And cutbacks in government seem assured. In a good-news-bad-news sandwich, Raha announced that general fund revenue for the 2009-11 biennium should come to $28.2 billion, $25 million higher than previously estimated, but that his forecast for the 2011-13 biennium is $30.2 billion, $122 million lower. Meanwhile, Governor Gregoire has warned the Legislature to be prepared for a “brutal” November special session “that could include even deeper cuts to state education spending,” as KING TV reported.
Hiring in education was one of the bright spots in this year’s jobs reports. As the state looks to cut another $2 billion, that seems unlikely to repeat itself. (At current spending/revenue levels, the state faces a deficit of nearly $1.4 billion through 2013.)
At long last, we may need to break through the no-new-revenues deadlock. The budget policy group behind Budget Schmudget argues that cutting education spending threatens economic growth, and advises a new capital gains tax. At a Seattle Transit Blog meetup, WSDOT’s Paula Hammond said that the gas tax “has lost 49% of its purchasing power over the last ten years since the tax isn’t tied to inflation.”
