Doctors have issued a new health warning as a 'super flu' sweeping across the US left a toddler paralysed.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in its latest report that at least nine children have died of flu this season.
It comes after hospital visits for 'flu-like' illness are at their highest in nearly 30 years, driven by a new strain of H3N2, called subclade K.
Subclade K is the mutated variant of the influenza A (H3N2) virus that has driven a significant surge in flu cases during the winter season.
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It's dubbed the 'super flu' due to its rapid spread and symptoms including high fever, severe muscle and body aches, extreme fatigue, persistent cough and intense headaches.
"This new strain has symptoms of really high fevers. It has a really bad cough that won't go away, very phlegmy, and also vomiting and diarrhea and lots of joint aches as well as muscle aches," Dr Juanita Mora, national spokesperson for the American Lung Association, told NBC Chicago.
In one case, two-year-old Sara Lopez was hospitalised for weeks and is currently recovering from transverse myelitis.
The disorder, which interrupts the messages spinal cord nerves send to the body, can be triggered by the flu and leads to paralysis.
Sara's mum Kenia Lopez told WSB-TV 2: "When I would say come here, she wouldn't do it either. She would just throw her upper torso.
"Overnight, everything got worse. She couldn't sit up on her own, she couldn't talk, she couldn't move pretty much anything, just her head a little bit.
"After a few hours of her being uncomfortable, we noticed that she really wasn’t moving her arms," the parent added to Fox 5.
Following a hospital visit, Sarah's symptoms got worse, and as the paralysis spread, she was rushed to the Erlanger’s Children’s Hospital in Chattanooga.
"She couldn’t move at all, she could just move her head a little bit, she was completely paralysed," Lopez said.
Sara, who was intubated for a week, is now out of hospital but is still struggling to move.
"The support that we’ve received is kind of what has kept me going, because if it wasn’t for that, I tell myself every day, this is not something anybody would be able to deal with," the mum said, noting that Sara did not have a vaccine.
Dr. Cecil Bennett of Newnan Family Medicine Associates warned: "Unfortunately, we still have about two more months of flu season that we have to go through. So it's not too late to get the flu shot."
The CDC said 11 million people have been diagnosed with the flu this year and recommends that anyone six months and older who has not yet been vaccinated this season get an annual influenza (flu) vaccine.
Anish Vij