Nasty Flu Bug Grips Queens

Even the borough president’s got it!
Its hallmarks are a hacking cough, fever, a bad headache, sniffles and body aches.
Guess what? It’s the flu. Welcome to the "wheezin’ season."
Bayside’s Dr. Bob Mittman, a veteran of countless flu epidemics in Queens, calls this the worst one in his experience.
"I’ve never seen as much suffering as from the current wave of flu cases," he said. "I even have a number of doctor friends who are down with this bug."
Mittman took a break from a siege of patients in his office last week to tell a Queens Courier reporter details of the latest flu invasion.
"The predominant symptoms here are headache, fever, body aches, chills and a hacking cough," he said. "I just saw a 35-year-old banker who woke up with a 103 degree fever. He’s a guy who said he had never been sick a day in his life. His inclination was to go back to work, but the symptoms —mainly fever and chills—took him to my office."
Mittman advises flu patients to stay home from work.
"You’ll infect your colleagues," he warned. "This is a particularly contagious strain of the flu. If you have this bug, don’t go to the office."
The Bayside allergist said that doctors do have two new antibiotics for the flu that are quite effective.
How has he avoided catching the flu from a roomful of sufferers?
"Just lucky, I guess," he said.
A survey of area hospital rooms and walk-in medical offices found jammed emergency rooms and patients waiting five and six hours to see a doctor.
Last weekend one hacking patient at First Med in Glendale waited two hours to see a doctor in a small waiting room filled with flu sufferers.
"I’ve been coughing for two nights now," the patient, who asked to remain anonymous, said. "I keep my husband up nights and my daughter and grandchildren are worried."
Another patient remarked wryly:
"Maybe Donald Trump’s got the right idea when he shuns handshakes to protect himself against illness."
Dr. Diane Sixsmith, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens, said flu patients were lying on gurneys in the halls because the waiting room was packed.
"This is the worst year yet for flu," she said. "Patients are sicker longer and more young people are getting infected."
Sixsmith said her daughter was down with the flu at home. Her brother called her recently from Pittsburgh for advice on what to do for his flu.
Some 1,400 flu patients visited NYHQ’s emergency room last December, compared to 1,200 in December 1998. For sicker patients needing more diagnostic tests, there is now a five to six hour wait to see a physician. "We have added more physicians and nurses to handle the overflow," Sixsmith said.
The LIJH physician said this year two new prescription drugs, Zanamivir or oseltamivir, taken within 48 hours of flue onset, can cut symptoms.
Sixsmith, asked how overwhelmed New York City Hospitals, would cope with a bio-terrorist attack, she admitted, "we worry about it."
At Long Island Jewish Hospital, Dr. Thomas Kwiatkowski, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine, agreed with his colleagues at other hospitals.
"It’s been absolutely horrible," he said.
He added that the emergency room handles 225 to 250 patients a day and has increased staff to handle the crowds of coughing, sneezing patients.
Kwiatkowski has been based at LIJH since 1985 and said the flu epidemics of the last two years have been the most serious he has seen.
"The emergency room is backed up," he said. "We’ve added six more nurses."
Kwiatkowski’s main concern is for the elderly and patients with emphysema, heart disease and other immuno-compromised conditions.
"The seriously ill patients number about 30 or 40 a day who are waiting for beds to open up," he said.
Both Flushing Hospital Medical Center and Jamaica Hospital Medical Center also report a high proportion of flu cases.
A spokesperson for the institutions said Jamaica was seeing 265 patients a day and and Flushing was seeing 120 patients a day. He said Jamaica was seeing a 30 percent increase in flu cases and Flushing from 20-25 percent.
Public health officials said that this year’s flu is Type A Sydney and is particularly virulent and persistent.
A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that most years, between 50,000 and 300,000 people in the U.S. are hospitalized for the disease or its complications.
The CDC worries that the world is due for a pandemic similar to the one in 1918-19 that caused 20 million deaths worldwide, 500,l000 of them in the United States.
"We just don’t have enough doctors, nurses, and morgues to handle it," the CDC official said.
And you though the Y2K bug was worrisome.