Flu sending many elderly to hospitals, CDC says
[link to www.cidrap.umn.edu]
" Jan 18, 2013 (CIDRAP News) – This year's edition of influenza is hitting the elderly hard, putting many in hospitals, even as overall flu activity is showing signs of slowing down, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today.

"We're in the middle of flu season, about halfway through, and it's shaping up to be worse than average and a bad season particularly for the elderly," CDC Director Thomas Frieden, MD, MPH, said at a noontime media briefing.

"Last week hospitalization rates increased sharply in people 65 and over, and this week they increased sharply again, going up to 82 per 100,000, which is quite a high rate," he said, referring to numbers in the CDC's weekly flu activity update. The cumulative all-ages hospitalization rate is 18.8 per 100,000. "