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On January 24, the CDC reported that over 130 cases of the “GII.4 Sydney” norovirus strain had been confirmed in the United States. Also known as the stomach flu, or viral gastroenteritis, the new strain first appeared in Australia in March 2012.

An article in the Washington Post cites the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report as showing that two-thirds of this season’s norovirus outbreaks occurred in long-term care institutions. Thirteen percent involved restaurants.

“There are five main types of norovirus,” according to the article. ”Historically, GII.4 strains are more severe than others.”

The norovirus is very contagious and can be picked up just about anywhere. You can get the virus from eating contaminated food or using utensils that have been contaminated with the virus, from touching contaminated surfaces, and from being around someone who is sick with the virus.

As there are no vaccines that protect one from the norovirus, prevention is the best cure! Washing your hands with soap & water, especially before preparing or eating food is essential and generally better than using alcohol based hand sanitizers as these do not kill viruses.

There’s one word on the minds of Public Heath professionals nationwide—“flu.” According to the CDC, 41 states are reporting widespread geographic influenza activity and some cities, including Boston, have declared a public health emergency.

“We are into what would classically be described as a flu epidemic,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH stated.

This season’s flu is hitting children particularly hard. Over 20 children under the age of 18 have died from complications of the flu.  Thankfully, there are positive trends emerging. It appears that the flu has dropped off in portions of the South and Southeast, according to an article on cnn.com. “[It appears] to have done so because that was where the flu season started earliest,” according a health official interviewed for the story.

View the CDC’s influenza situation update page by clicking here.

Each week, the CDC publishes an influenza summary update and as public health professionals already know, this year’s flu season has started strong and early. This year’s flu season got the earliest start since the “moderately severe” season of 2003, according to WebMD Health News.

So far, flu-like illnesses have been reported as “widespread” in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. And WebMD’s cold and flu map is showing additional “severe” flu activity in Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota.

EpiCenter’s data is showing a similar uptick in national flu-related ER visits. From October through mid-December, fever-related ER visits have increased nearly threefold—while respiratory-related ER visits have slightly increased.

The CDC estimates that 112 million Americans have already received flu shots this season—meaning 37% of the eligible population endured the needle or nasal spray. HMS will keep tabs on the flu data that EpiCenter collects and continue to post updates to provide public health professionals with additional information on this year’s flu season.

HMS is currently working toward receiving Modular Certification (Public Health Surveillance) for its Mergence platform.  This will assist hospitals in achieving Meaningful Use Compliance—without requiring facilities to change their current EpiCenter or EpiStart data feeds.

The key to this certification is the utilization of HMS’ Mergence data integration engine. Mergence, which is a service provided to a medical facility, was the first open source integration engine to work with HL7 and general XML data types. While the first generation of Mergence was open source, today’s Mergence has been fine-tuned to meet our clients’ needs.  Mergence is suitable to a variety of tasks that HL7 integration engines simply cannot accomplish. Data from Mergence is sent in certified, secure format to HMS’ EpiCenter system.

HMS will be able to route incoming data feeds through the Mergence engine which will then output a data stream, in the HL7 format required by MU2, and onto EpiCenter or EpiStart, thereby meeting the MU2 requirements, and implementation specifications, related to the submission of Syndromic Surveillance data to public health departments.

“Providing this service affirms our commitment to customer service,” states Kevin Hutchison, HMS President and CEO. “It ensures that current—and future—users of the system continue to gain valuable insight and support regarding important issues that impact public health.”