When all other moneymaking ideas fail, you can always try selling your worldly possessions. But even that can run into a wall.
Two new books — “Plan Your Prosperity” and “Diary of a Hedgehog” — offer ideas to consider long before you invest in any market.
WASHINGTON -- President Obama on Friday said he is moving up the deadline for Afghan forces to take the lead in securing their own country, a decision that could speed the withdrawal of U.S. forces in the coming months.
After a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the White House, Obama said American troops would turn over the responsibility this spring rather than in the middle of 2013, the previous target.
“What’s going to happen this spring is that Afghans will be in the lead throughout the country,” Obama said at a joint news conference with Karzai. “That doesn’t mean that coalition forces, including U.S. forces, are no longer fighting. They will still be fighting alongside Afghan troops ... in a training, assisting, advising role.”
Obama said he hasn’t “fully determined” what that means in terms of the pace of drawdown, but that he will make that decision after consultations with commanders on the ground. Obama has vowed to withdraw nearly all of the 66,000 U.S. troops in the country by the end of 2014.
Obama and Karzai spent much of the day of meetings and a working lunch discussing the strategy and role of a residual U.S. force after that date. Obama was not willing to discuss publicly the specific numbers of troops that may be left, although he described the post-2014 mission as “very limited” and focused on training and counter terrorism missions.
Standing next to his Afghan counterpart, Obama did not mince words regarding the conditions under which troops will remain in Afghanistan after 2014. They must have immunity from prosecution for doing their jobs, he said, drawing a clear line on an issue that is expected to be a sticking point in the final negotiations between the two countries.
Based on the progress toward their agreement, Karzai told the president that he would advocate for that immunity, aides to the Obama said.
The leaders indicated that other progress had been made in the meeting. They touted an agreement to open an office in Qatar as an incentive to the Taliban to restart peace negotiations that broke off last spring.
Obama repeated his vow to end -- swiftly and responsibly -- the war whose ending will likely be central to his foreign policy legacy. As he provided assurances that the U.S. has achieved or has “come very close to achieving” the chief goal of upending the Al Qaeda operations in Afghanistan, Obama also acknowledged how the hopes for a post-war Afghanistan have fallen.
“Have we achieved everything that some might have imagined us achieving in the best of scenarios? Probably not. You know, this is a human enterprise, and, you know, you fall short of the ideal,” Obama said, reflecting on the success of the overall mission.
Kathleen.hennessey@latimes.com
Twitter:@khennessey
Christi.parsons@latimes.com
Twitter: @cparsons
Three days before the moon-orbiting Ebb spacecraft collided with a lunar mountain, its on-board cameras captured some striking images of the pockmarked moon’s northern hemisphere — from just six miles up. On Jan. 10, NASA released what look like scenes from a science fiction movie: two probe’s-eye views of the lunar farside, made from Ebb’s stitched-together images.
The clips are played six times faster than the spacecraft’s flyover actually occurred. The first was shot by the forward-facing MoonKAM, and the second was taken by a rear-facing camera.
Ebb was one of the twin GRAIL spacecraft tasked with mapping the moon’s gravity field — a successful mission that came to an end in December. The images used to create this flyover video were shot on Dec. 14 as the washing machine-size probes began final preparations for the mission’s planned end. On Dec. 17, the twins crashed into a mountainous crater rim near the lunar north pole, a site which is now named after astronaut Sally Ride.
Video: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT/SRS
Homepage Photo: Nasa
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Paul Scheuring, the executive producer of ABC’s “Zero Hour,” says the conspiracy driving the new ABC drama will “100 percent” wrap up at the end of its first season.
Premeiring February 14, the show follows Anthony Edwards (“ER”) as the publisher of a magazine that investigates conspiracy theories. But after his wife (Jacinda Barrett) is abducted from her antique clock shop, Edwards’ character is pulled into one of the most compelling mysteries in human history. We don’t know exactly what that mystery is yet, but it involves clocks and Nazis.
Despite the massive scale of the tale, which stretches across the globe and back in time several centuries, season one’s storyline won’t be stretched across future seasons — a practice that Scheuring says leads to writers “flapping” their wings.
“One of the things I learned from ‘Prison Break’ and making a serialized show is that if you’re a single conceived show, like ‘Prison Break’ or ‘Lost,’” he said Thursday at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “Sooner or later you start flapping your wings because a story needs to end.”
So instead of trying to “stretch, stretch, stretch, stretch” the narrative, Scheuring modeled the series like “24.”
“It’s like the ’24′ model where you reset every year,” he continued. “This entire Nazi conspiracy thing will be done by episode 13 this year.”
But just like Jack Bauer’s addiction to danger in “24,” the characters in “Zero Hour” will dive into another conspiracy if they’re lucky enough to return for a second season.
“We have a group of investigators, headed by Anthony, at the magazine which can then apply those skills to the next investigation,” Scheuring concluded.
TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News
I doubt that our forebears who ratified the Second Amendment in 1791 ever imagined how carelessly and callously firearms would be used centuries later. Witness the senseless slaughter of 20 innocent children and 6 adults last month in Newtown, Conn. As a mother of two and grandmother of four, I can’t imagine a more painful loss.
If you are as concerned as I am about the safety of your children and grandchildren, consider that it may be time for a grass-roots movement, comparable to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, to help break the stranglehold the National Rifle Association seems to have on our elected officials. Do you really want, as the association proposed, an armed guard in every school?
The Connecticut massacre occurred just two months after the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a new policy statement on firearm-related injuries to children. Murder and accidental shootings were not the academy’s only concerns. “Suicides among the young are typically impulsive,” the statement noted, “and easy access to lethal weapons largely determines outcome.”
In an article published online last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Judith S. Palfrey, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, and her husband, Dr. Sean Palfrey, also a pediatrician in Boston, highlighted the shocking statistics.
Every day in the United States, 18 children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 die from gun-related injuries. That makes guns the second leading cause of death in young people — twice the number of deaths from cancer, five times the deaths from heart disease and 15 times the deaths from infections.
Dr. Judith S. Palfrey has seen this heartbreak up close. “My niece, who was sad about something, might be alive today if she hadn’t had such easy access to a handgun at age 18,” she told me.
The United States has the dubious distinction of leading high-income countries in firearm homicides, suicides and unintentional deaths among young people. Among American children ages 5 to 14, an international study showed that firearm suicide rates were six times higher, and death rates from unintentional firearm injuries 10 times higher, than in other high-income countries.
Innocent Victims
The Palfreys said they were haunted by the death of one of their patients, a 12-year-old boy who went on an errand for his mother and was caught in the cross-fire of a gun battle. The boy had shortly before written a letter to his mother expressing his desire to become a doctor.
And Dr. Sean Palfrey recalls “with horror” picking up a loaded .22-caliber rifle, at age 11 or 12, and threatening his baby sitter with it. “This scared the hell out of me and remains seared in my memory. I could have killed this person.”
In explaining why he had a gun, he said, “I’m a great-grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, who was a hunter as well as a naturalist, and when I grew up guns were an acceptable part of youth. I took target practice and was an N.R.A. member myself as a child. We had guns for hunting, not automatic weapons that can shoot hundreds of rounds within seconds.”
Now, he said, “I do all my shooting with a camera. This is not the same world it was when the Second Amendment was written. Guns have to be removed so that they can’t be accessed by those who are immature, impulsive or mentally ill.”
In their article, the Palfreys pointed out that “little children explore their worlds without understanding danger, and in one unsupervised moment, an encounter with a gun can end in fatality.” School-age children who see guns used on television, in movies or video games “don’t necessarily understand that people who are really shot may really die,” they said.
Among teenagers, who may fight over girlfriends or sneakers, or have their judgment impaired by drugs or alcohol, “a fistfight may cause transient injuries, but a gunfight can kill rivals, friends, or innocent bystanders,” the pediatricians wrote. Among depressed adolescents, they said, “less than 5 percent of suicide attempts involving drugs are lethal, but 90 percent of those involving guns are.”
Preventing Access
In a 2006 study of gun-owning Americans with children under age 18, 21.7 percent stored a gun loaded, 31.5 percent stored one unlocked, and 8.3 percent stored at least one gun unlocked and loaded. And in households with adolescents ages 13 to 17, firearms were left unlocked 41.7 percent of the time.
These are accidents, or worse, waiting to happen, and the pediatrics academy reiterated its earlier recommendations that pediatricians talk to parents about guns in the home and their safe storage, and follow up by distributing cable locks.
To limit unauthorized access to guns, the academy recommended the use of trigger locks, lockboxes, personalized safety mechanisms, and trigger pressures that are too high for young children.
Still, the academy emphasized, “the safest home for a child or adolescent is one without firearms.”
The Palfreys said that when one of their colleagues asked a mother about guns in her home, she responded, “Why, yes, I have a loaded gun in the drawer of my bedside table.” It was only then the woman realized that this could be a danger to her child, Dr. Judith Palfrey said.
The academy also called for restoring the federal ban, in effect from 1994 to 2004, on the sale of assault weapons to the general public. None of the many attempts to renew it have succeeded in Congress.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2010, in the case of McDonald v. the City of Chicago, that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to provisions of the Second Amendment, and prevented states and localities from restricting citizens’ right to bear arms. The academy stated that the ruling “set the stage for Second Amendment legal challenges to local and state gun laws, including laws requiring the safe storage of firearms and trigger locks, as well as laws aimed at protecting children from firearms.”
In 2011, Florida passed legislation that raised First Amendment questions by forbidding doctors to ask families about guns in the home. Although a permanent injunction against the law was issued, Gov. Rick Scott has appealed the ruling. At the federal level, wording introduced into the Affordable Care Act restricts collection of data on guns in the home.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 11, 2013
The Personal Health column on Tuesday, about firearms and children, using information from The New England Journal of Medicine, misstated the number of children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 who die each day in the United States from gun-related injuries. Eighteen people between the ages of 1 and 24 die every day — not seven people between those ages. (Seven deaths a day is the number for children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 19.) And the article misstated part of a Supreme Court ruling. In the case of McDonald v. the City of Chicago in 2010, the court ruled that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment — not the equal protection clause — applied to provisions of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 11, 2013
A chart posted with an earlier version of this article also misstated the number of children and young adults between the ages of 1 and 24 killed every day in the United States by gun injuries. It is 18, not seven.
8:46 a.m. | Updated
Wells Fargo reported $5.1 billion in profit for the fourth quarter on Friday, a 24 percent increase, driven by the bank’s lucrative mortgage business.
Seizing on low-interest rates that have spurred a flurry of refinancing activity, the bank again notched record profits. For the last 12 quarters, profits at the bank have increased.
In this latest quarter, Wells Fargo, based in San Francisco, reported earnings of 91 cents a share, which exceeded analysts’ expectations. Ahead of the report, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters estimated that the bank would report earnings of 89 a share.
Wells Fargo, unlike many of its rivals, has been able to steadily increase its revenue. The first bank to release fourth-quarter earnings, Wells Fargo reported $21.95 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 7 percent from a year earlier.
Much of the revenue gains stemmed from the bank’s consumer lending business, as borrowers jumped on record low interest rates to refinance their mortgages. Wells Fargo, which dominates the market as the nation’s largest mortgage lender, notched $125 billion in mortgage originations, up from $120 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011. Refinancing applications accounted for nearly 75 percent of that total.
The big profit in the group came from the extra money that Wells Fargo makes bundling the mortgages into bonds and selling them to the government. In the fourth quarter, the bank reported $2.8 billion of so-called net gains on its mortgages activities, up 51 percent from the previous year.
The question is whether those gains are sustainable. Refinancing activity shows signs of tapering off. And the housing recovery is far from robust, which means it may be tough to make new mortgages.
Investors seemed to look beyond the strong profits to the potential challenges. Shares of the Wells Fargo were down modestly on Friday, as the bank reported a drop in its net interest margin.
Under the tenure of its chief executive, John G. Stumpf, Wells Fargo has aggressively expanded into the mortgage market, a strategy that might help the bank surpass its rivals in profits, notably JPMorgan Chase.
Wells Fargo’s net interest margin, a closely watched profit metric that measures the difference between the interest the bank collects and the interest it pays on its own borrowings, was down slightly to 3.56 percent, from 3.89 percent a year earlier.
Profit in the community banking division, which spans Wells Fargo’s retail branches and mortgage business, increased 14 percent to $2.9 billion.
The bank successfully courted more cash from depositors, adding $72 billion in total core checking and savings deposits than a year earlier.
“The company’s underlying results were driven by solid loan growth, improved credit quality, and continued success in improving efficiency,” Wells Fargo’s chief financial officer, Tim Sloan, said in a statement.
The bank has benefited from sweeping federal stimulus initiatives that have buoyed the mortgage business. The Treasury Department has helped spur Americans to refinance their mortgages.
Wells Fargo is the reigning titan in the mortgage industry, generating roughly a third of all the mortgages across the United States. Mortgage originations continued to climb, up 4 percent to $125 billion.
Adding to its mortgage-related profit, Wells Fargo reported a $926 million profit from its servicing business, in which the bank collects payments from homeowners. That’s up roughly 6 percent from a year earlier.
Alongside the consumer loan business, Wells Fargo had gains in its wealth management business, a particular focus for the bank to defray the impact of federal regulations that dragged down profits elsewhere.
Still, Wells Fargo’s profit from residential mortgages could wane this year if the Federal Reserve halts its extensive bond buying spree.
Working to move beyond the mortgage crisis woes that have dogged the bank, Wells Fargo has been brokering deals with federal regulators. Wells Fargo was one of 10 banks that signed onto an $8.5 billion settlement this week with the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve over claims that shoddy foreclosure practices may have led to the wrongful eviction of homeowners.
The sweeping federal pact ends a deeply flawed review of millions of loans in foreclosure that was mandated by federal regulators in 2011. The review, which was ended this week, began in November 2011 amid mounting public fury that bank employees were churning through hundreds of foreclosure filings without reviewing them for accuracy.
In addition to the settlement, the bank set aside $1.2 billion to prevent foreclosures.
Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.
A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.
"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.
The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.
The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.
The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.
"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."
The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.
But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.
Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.
"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."
The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.
At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."
During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.
And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.
"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."
mike.anton@latimes.com
rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com
As a gamer, I can’t help but be wowed by Nvidia’s Project Shield. But after getting to use the Android-powered portable gaming console/controller/mini-tablet hybrid device here at CES, I see some potential pitfalls.
Project Shield is a console-style gaming controller with the buttons, triggers, dual joysticks and single directional pad you’re familiar with if you’ve ever touched an Xbox or PlayStation controller. It’s comfortable for gameplay and everything responds well for a prototype, though the joysticks and triggers feel like they could use a bit more tuning before the device heads to retail.
But Project Shield is more than a controller. It has a 5-inch 720p touchscreen built into a clam shell cover. The display is detailed, bright and really, really attractive — it’s competitive with any phone or tablet out there.
Project Shield runs what is essentially stock Android Jelly Bean, which is the best flavor of Android out there. As such, the device can run any Android game or app found in Google Play. Thanks to an HDMI port, anything that shows up on Project Shield can show up on our HDTV. It can’t, however, make a phone call, but that’s no biggie. This is, after all, a device designed with gamers in mind.
The most tremendous feature of Project Shield is its ability to stream PC games (including those found on the popular gaming service Steam) from a PC in your home, to the device’s 5-inch display. I played Need For Speed Most Wanted, streamed from a PC, and it went smoothly, with no noticeable lag or degradation in visual quality while playing. But the PC streaming only works if your PC is on the same Wi-Fi network as Project Shield (i.e. no PC streaming outside of the home) and if the streaming PC has Nvidia’s GeForce GTX graphic processor installed.
The technology used to pull of this PC streaming — the interaction between the GeForce GTX and the Nvidia Tegra 4 processor inside of Project Shield — should show up in more of Nvidia’s graphics cards in the future. If that pans out, the best case scenario here is that this PC streaming capability will grow over time. The worst case scenario is that Project Shield will be used simply as an Android gaming console and nothing else — which, if priced right, wouldn’t be a horrible.
At the moment, Nvidia isn’t saying what Project Shield will cost. This decision will be key. Google’s Nexus 7, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPads have opened up an entirely new world of gaming in large part because they’re accessibly priced. Project Shield, which Nvidia says will be renamed before it officially goes on sale, offers the promise of the best features of a tablet married with console-quality gaming. It’s an attractive concept, but getting a lot of consumers to pick up a Shield instead of a tablet, or a Nintendo 3DS, will be tough if the price tag is too high.
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PARIS (Reuters) – French film star Gerard Depardieu skipped a court hearing on drink-driving charges on Tuesday as he pursued a headline-grabbing world tour that has seen him set up an alleged tax haven home in Belgium and pick up a passport in Russia.
The garrulous actor’s lawyer said he had missed the hearing in Paris because he was now in Montenegro for meetings about a film in which he will play disgraced former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
He was not obliged to attend the pre-trial hearing, but the no-show means the case will turn into a full trial, guaranteeing another day in the spotlight for Depardieu, already caught up in a public row with French authorities over his tax status.
It could also lead to the 64-year-old star of “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “Asterix and Obelix” getting a tougher sentence if convicted – in theory up to two years in prison.
“Despite wanting to be there and meet the judges and in no way to escape justice, Gerard Depardieu absolutely could not be present,” his lawyer Eric de Caumont told a scrum of reporters outside the Paris courtroom on Tuesday.
He said Depardieu was in Montenegro negotiating a deal for the film about Strauss-Kahn, who was seen as the next president of France until a U.S. sex scandal ended his career.
Depardieu also met Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, who suggested he might become a cultural ambassador for Montenegro.
Asked if that meant he planned to add Montenegrin citizenship to his growing list, Depardieu said: “I’m not collecting passports …
“If I got a Montenegrin passport it would be without personal gain. But … I’m honored by the idea that I could be a Montenegrin cultural ambassador to the world.”
HIGH TAX POLICY
Depardieu’s actions have guaranteed international coverage of a high-tax policy by France‘s Socialist government that has seen a stream of wealthy citizens seek exile.
His purchase of a house in Belgium last month spurred accusations that he was trying to avoid tax.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault called the move “pathetic” and unpatriotic, and Depardieu’s acceptance of a Russian passport last week provoked even fiercer charges that he had abandoned his homeland.
Russia has a flat income tax rate of 13 percent, compared to the 75 percent on income over 1 million euros ($ 1.32 million) that President Francois Hollande wants to levy in France.
Actor-director Mathieu Kassovitz, best known abroad for his role in the whimsical movie romance “Amelie”, said on Monday he understood those fleeing high taxes and that he also planned to quit France because of a lack of financing for films.
Depardieu denied on Monday that he was leaving France for tax reasons.
“I have a Russian passport, but I remain French and I will probably have dual Belgian nationality. But if I’d wanted to escape the taxman, as the French press say, I would have done it a long time ago,” he said.
Depardieu is a larger-than-life figure who began his long career playing thugs and drop-outs before moving on to leading-man roles in films like the romantic comedy “Green Card”.
The actor is accused of crashing his scooter in Paris with more than three times the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. No one else was injured in the accident.
By skipping the pre-trial hearing, he missed out on the chance to strike a bargain with prosecutors.
A few months before the scooter incident, a car driver accused Depardieu of assault and battery during an altercation in Paris. Last year, the actor outraged passengers on an Air France flight by urinating into a bottle in the aisle.
(Additional Reporting by Thierry Leveque and Catherine Bremer in Paris and Petar Komnenic in Podgorica; Editing by Mark John and Kevin Liffey)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
It is not your imagination — more people you know are sick this winter, even people who have had flu shots.
The country is in the grip of three emerging flu or flulike epidemics: an early start to the annual flu season with an unusually aggressive virus, a surge in a new type of norovirus, and the worst whooping cough outbreak in 60 years. And these are all developing amid the normal winter highs for the many viruses that cause symptoms on the “colds and flu” spectrum.
Influenza is widespread, and causing local crises. On Wednesday, Boston’s mayor declared a public health emergency as cases flooded hospital emergency rooms.
Google’s national flu trend maps, which track flu-related searches, are almost solid red (for “intense activity”) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly FluView maps, which track confirmed cases, are nearly solid brown (for “widespread activity”).
“Yesterday, I saw a construction worker, a big strong guy in his Carhartts who looked like he could fall off a roof without noticing it,” said Dr. Beth Zeeman, an emergency room doctor for MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham, Mass., just outside Boston. “He was in a fetal position with fever and chills, like a wet rag. When I see one of those cases, I just tighten up my mask a little.”
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston started asking visitors with even mild cold symptoms to wear masks and to avoid maternity wards. The hospital has treated 532 confirmed influenza patients this season and admitted 167, even more than it did by this date during the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic.
At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, 100 patients were crowded into spaces licensed for 53. Beds lined halls and pressed against vending machines. Overflow patients sat on benches in the lobby wearing surgical masks.
“Today was the first time I think I was experiencing my first pandemic,” said Heidi Crim, the nursing director, who saw both the swine flu and SARS outbreaks here. Adding to the problem, she said, many staff members were at home sick and supplies like flu test swabs were running out.
Nationally, deaths and hospitalizations are still below epidemic thresholds. But experts do not expect that to remain true. Pneumonia usually shows up in national statistics only a week or two after emergency rooms report surges in cases, and deaths start rising a week or two after that, said Dr. Gregory A. Poland, a vaccine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The predominant flu strain circulating is an H3N2, which typically kills more people than the H1N1 strains that usually predominate; the relatively lethal 2003-4 “Fujian flu” season was overwhelmingly H3N2.
No cases have been resistant to Tamiflu, which can ease symptoms if taken within 48 hours, and this year’s flu shot is well-matched to the H3N2 strain, the C.D.C. said. Flu shots are imperfect, especially in the elderly, whose immune systems may not be strong enough to produce enough antibodies.
Simultaneously, the country is seeing a large and early outbreak of norovirus, the “cruise ship flu” or “stomach flu,” said Dr. Aron J. Hall of the C.D.C.’s viral gastroenterology branch. It includes a new strain, which first appeared in Australia and is known as the Sydney 2012 variant.
This week, Maine’s health department said that state was seeing a large spike in cases. Cities across Canada reported norovirus outbreaks so serious that hospitals were shutting down whole wards for disinfection because patients were getting infected after moving into the rooms of those who had just recovered. The classic symptoms of norovirus are “explosive” diarrhea and “projectile” vomiting, which can send infectious particles flying yards away.
“I also saw a woman I’m sure had norovirus,” Dr. Zeeman said. “She said she’d gone to the bathroom 14 times at home and 4 times since she came into the E.R. You can get dehydrated really quickly that way.”
This month, the C.D.C. said the United States was having its biggest outbreak of pertussis in 60 years; there were about 42,000 confirmed cases, the highest total since 1955. The disease is unrelated to flu but causes a hacking, constant cough and breathlessness. While it is unpleasant, adults almost always survive; the greatest danger is to infants, especially premature ones with undeveloped lungs. Of the 18 recorded deaths in 2012, all but three were of infants under age 1.
That outbreak is worst in cold-weather states, including Colorado, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Vermont.
Although most children are vaccinated several times against pertussis, those shots wear off with age. It is possible, the authorities said, that a new, safer vaccine introduced in the 1990s gives protection that does not last as long, so more teenagers and adults are vulnerable.
And, Dr. Poland said, if many New Yorkers are catching laryngitis, as has been reported, it is probably a rhinovirus. “It’s typically a sore, really scratchy throat, and you sometimes lose your voice,” he said.
Though flu cases in New York City are rising rapidly, the city health department has no plans to declare an emergency, largely because of concern that doing so would drive mildly sick people to emergency rooms, said Dr. Jay K. Varma, deputy director for disease control. The city would prefer people went to private doctors or, if still healthy, to pharmacies for flu shots. Nursing homes have had worrisome outbreaks, he said, and nine elderly patients have died. Homes need to be more alert, vaccinate patients, separate those who fall ill and treat them faster with antivirals, he said.
Dr. Susan I. Gerber of the C.D.C.’s respiratory diseases branch, said her agency has not seen any unusual spike of rhinovirus, parainfluenza, adenovirus, coronavirus or the dozens of other causes of the “common cold,” but the country is having its typical winter surge of some, like respiratory syncytial virus “that can mimic flulike symptoms, especially in young children.”
The C.D.C. and the local health authorities continue to advocate getting flu shots. Although it takes up to two weeks to build immunity, “we don’t know if the season has peaked yet,” said Dr. Joseph Bresee, chief of prevention in the agency’s flu division.
Flu shots and nasal mists contain vaccines against three strains, the H3N2, the H1N1 and a B. Thus far this season, Dr. Bresee said, H1N1 cases have been rare, and the H3N2 component has been a good match against almost all the confirmed H3N2 samples the agency has tested.
About a fifth of all flus this year thus far are from B strains. That part of the vaccine is a good match only 70 percent of the time, because two B’s are circulating.
For that reason, he said, flu shots are being reformulated. Within two years, they said, most will contain vaccines against both B strains.
Joanna Constantine, 28, a stylist at the Guy Thomas Hair Salon on West 56th Street in Manhattan, said she recently was so sick that she was off work and in bed for five days — and silenced by laryngitis for four of them.
She did not have the classic flu symptoms — a high fever, aches and chills — so she knew it was probably something else.
Still, she said, it scared her enough that she will get a flu shot next year. She had not bothered to get one since her last pregnancy, she said. But she has a 7-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter, “and my little guys get theirs every year.”
Jess Bidgood contributed reporting.
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