Flu season puts businesses and employees in a bind

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly half the 70 employees at a Ford dealership in Clarksville, Ind., have been out sick at some point in the past month. It didn't have to be that way, the boss says.

"If people had stayed home in the first place, a lot of times that spread wouldn't have happened," says Marty Book, a vice president at Carriage Ford. "But people really want to get out and do their jobs, and sometimes that's a detriment."

The flu season that has struck early and hard across the U.S. is putting businesses and employees alike in a bind. In this shaky economy, many Americans are reluctant to call in sick, something that can backfire for their employers.

Flu was widespread in 47 states last week, up from 41 the week before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. The only states without widespread flu were California, Mississippi and Hawaii. And the main strain of the virus circulating tends to make people sicker than usual.

Blake Fleetwood, president of Cook Travel in New York, says his agency is operating with less than 40 percent of its staff of 35 because of the flu and other ailments.

"The people here are working longer hours and it puts a lot of strain on everyone," Fleetwood says. "You don't know whether to ask people with the flu to come in or not." He says the flu is also taking its toll on business as customers cancel their travel plans: "People are getting the flu and they're reduced to a shriveling little mess and don't feel like going anywhere."

Many workers go to the office even when they're sick because they are worried about losing their jobs, says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employer consulting firm. Other employees report for work out of financial necessity, since roughly 40 percent of U.S. workers don't get paid if they are out sick. Some simply have a strong work ethic and feel obligated to show up.

Flu season typically costs employers $10.4 billion for hospitalization and doctor's office visits, according to the CDC. That does not include the costs of lost productivity from absences.

At Carriage Ford, Book says the company plans to make flu shots mandatory for all employees.

Linda Doyle, CEO of the Northcrest Community retirement home in Ames, Iowa, says the company took that step this year for its 120 employees, providing the shots at no cost. It is also supplying face masks for all staff.

And no one is expected to come into work if sick, she says.

So far, the company hasn't seen an outbreak of flu cases.

"You keep your fingers crossed and hope it continues this way," Doyle says. "You see the news and it's frightening. We just want to make sure that we're doing everything possible to keep everyone healthy. Cleanliness is really the key to it. Washing your hands. Wash, wash, wash."

Among other steps employers can take to reduce the spread of the flu on the job: holding meetings via conference calls, staggering shifts so that fewer people are on the job at the same time, and avoiding handshaking.

Newspaper editor Rob Blackwell says he had taken only two sick days in the last two years before coming down with the flu and then pneumonia in the past two weeks. He missed several days the first week of January and has been working from home the past week.

"I kept trying to push myself to get back to work because, generally speaking, when I'm sick I just push through it," says Blackwell, the Washington bureau chief for the daily trade paper American Banker.

Connecticut is the only state that requires some businesses to pay employees when they are out sick. Cities such as San Francisco and Washington have similar laws.

Challenger and others say attitudes are changing, and many companies are rethinking their sick policies to avoid officewide outbreaks of the flu and other infectious diseases.

"I think companies are waking up to the fact right now that you might get a little bit of gain from a person coming into work sick, but especially when you have an epidemic, if 10 or 20 people then get sick, in fact you've lost productivity," Challenger says.

___

Associated Press writers Mike Stobbe in Atlanta, Eileen A.J. Connelly in New York, Paul Wiseman in Washington, Barbara Rodriguez in Des Moines, Iowa, and Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed to this report.

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For the record

City attorney's race: In the Jan. 11 LATExtra section, an article about the Los Angeles city attorney race said that candidate Mike Feuer was the first person to get Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's endorsement in a citywide contest in this municipal elections season. On Friday, the mayor's office said it had erred in supplying that information, as Villaraigosa had previously endorsed Councilman Dennis Zine, who is running for controller.

Clippers: In the Jan. 11 Sports section, an article about the Clippers said that they would play three consecutive road games against teams whose records were a combined 14 games over .500 as of Thursday. Those teams were a combined 19 games over .500.

Dog mauling: In the Jan. 10 LATExtra section, a brief news item about maulings by dogs in Mexico City listed Tracy Wilkinson as the author. It was written by Daniel Hernandez.

Gun control: In the Jan. 9 Section A, an article about activists trying to build grass-roots support for federal gun-control legislation said that the mass shooting at Virginia Tech was in 2005. It was in 2007.

Money and politics: In the Jan. 10 Section A, an article about President Obama's record on limiting the influence of money in politics said that the third anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case is Jan. 20. The anniversary is Jan. 21.

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Britney & Jason's Love Story in 6 Sweet Shots

From a snuggle in the surf to a surprise engagement, see the former couple's most romantic moments

Credit: Kevin Mazur/Wireimage

Updated: Friday Jan 11, 2013 | 07:00 AM EST
By: Cara Lynn Shultz

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IHT Rendezvous: Top Pirate Quits as Tide Turns Against Somali Raiders

LONDON — A notorious Somali sea raider known as Big Mouth is a pirate with a retirement plan.

He announced this week that he was quitting after an eight-year career in which he and his pirate crews plagued shipping in the Indian Ocean and raised millions of dollars in ransom.

Big Mouth — Mohamed Abdi Hassan — was named in a United Nations report last year as one of the most notorious and influential leaders of a Somali pirate network.

His decision to call it a day may be further evidence that international action, including patrols by European and other navies, is at last succeeding in containing the piracy scourge off the coast of east Africa.

“I have decided to renounce and quit, and from today on I will not be involved in this gang activity,” the pirate leader said in Somalia’s northern region of Adado on Wednesday. (You can watch his valedictory press conference here.)

He said he had also successfully encouraged many of his colleagues to quit.

Mr. Hassan’s decision came in the same week in which Koji Sekimizu of Japan, head of the International Maritime Organization, said 2012 saw a sharp reduction in successful piracy incidents off the coast of Somalia and in the Indian Ocean.

During the course of the year, the sea raiders only succeeded in capturing 13 vessels, as against 49 in 2010 and 28 in 2011, a year that saw a record number of pirate attacks.

The European Union’s naval task force in the region said last April that factors in the decrease included more armed security aboard merchant vessels and the presence of foreign navies.

Timo Lange, the spokesman for the force, said recently that anti-piracy efforts had been enhanced by a European decision to allow navies to destroy pirate supplies on shore, whereas previously that power was limited to the open waters.

In May, the force performed its first shoreline operation, sending an aircraft over the Somali coast to destroy pirate equipment that had been assembled for a mission.

In Big Mouth’s case, an additional factor in his decision to quit might have been the provision of a diplomatic passport by Somalia’s transitional government as an inducement. Last year’s U.N. report said the pirate boss had used it to visit his wife and family abroad.

The biggest anti-piracy victory of the year came last month, when naval police from the breakaway province of Puntland overran a pirate stronghold and liberated the MV Iceberg, a Panama-flagged cargo vessel, and its 22 crew members, who had been held for almost three years.

Mr. Sekimuzu cautioned this week that the scourge was not yet over. Twelve vessels and 159 people were still in the hands of Somali pirates, he said.

There are also concerns that the eventual scaling back of some naval forces might encourage a resurgence.

In Britain, which is facing naval cutbacks, a consortium of business executives has set up the country’s first private navy in 200 years. This year it will start protecting shipping in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere at a daily cost of $10,000 to $12,000 per vessel.

Meanwhile, the maritime authorities are warning seafarers that a decline in piracy off Somalia is being offset by an increase in incidents off West Africa. There were 32 attacks in the Gulf of Guinea in the first half of 2012, as against 25 in the same period the previous year.

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Flu season strikes early and, in some places, hard

NEW YORK (AP) — From the Rocky Mountains to New England, hospitals are swamped with people with flu symptoms. Some medical centers are turning away visitors or making them wear face masks, and one Pennsylvania hospital set up a tent outside its ER to deal with the feverish patients.

Flu season in the U.S. has struck early and, in many places, hard.

While flu normally doesn't blanket the country until late January or February, it is already widespread in more than 40 states, with about 30 of them reporting some major hot spots. On Thursday, health officials blamed the flu for the deaths of 20 children so far.

Whether this will be considered a bad season by the time it has run its course in the spring remains to be seen.

"Those of us with gray hair have seen worse," said Dr. William Schaffner, a flu expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

The evidence so far points to a moderate season, Schaffner and others say. It looks bad in part because last year was unusually mild and because the main strain of influenza circulating this year tends to make people sicker and really lay them low.

David Smythe of New York City saw it happen to his 50-year-old girlfriend, who has been knocked out for about two weeks. "She's been in bed. She can't even get up," he said.

Also, the flu's early arrival coincided with spikes in a variety of other viruses, including a childhood malady that mimics flu and a new norovirus that causes vomiting and diarrhea, or what is commonly known as "stomach flu." So what people are calling the flu may, in fact, be something else.

"There may be more of an overlap than we normally see," said Dr. Joseph Bresee, who tracks the flu for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most people don't undergo lab tests to confirm flu, and the symptoms are so similar that it can be hard to distinguish flu from other viruses, or even a cold. Over the holidays, 250 people were sickened at a Mormon missionary training center in Utah, but the culprit turned out to be a norovirus, not the flu.

Flu is a major contributor, though, to what's going on.

"I'd say 75 percent," said Dr. Dan Surdam, head of the emergency department at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, Wyoming's largest hospital. The 17-bed emergency room saw its busiest day ever last week, with 166 visitors.

The early onslaught has resulted in a spike in hospitalizations. To deal with the influx and protect other patients from getting sick, hospitals are restricting visits from children, requiring family members to wear masks and banning anyone with flu symptoms from maternity wards.

One hospital in Allentown, Pa., set up a tent this week for a steady stream of patients with flu symptoms. But so far "what we're seeing is a typical flu season," said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital, Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest.

On Wednesday, Boston declared a public health emergency, with the city's hospitals counting about 1,500 emergency room visits since December by people with flu-like symptoms.

All the flu activity has led some to question whether this year's flu shot is working. While health officials are still analyzing the vaccine, early indications are that it's about 60 percent effective, which is in line with what's been seen in other years.

The vaccine is reformulated each year, based on experts' best guess of which strains of the virus will predominate. This year's vaccine is well-matched to what's going around. The government estimates that between a third and half of Americans have gotten the vaccine.

In New York City, 57-year-old Judith Quinones skipped getting a flu shot this season and suffered her worst case of flu-like illness in years. She was laid up for nearly a month with fever and body aches. "I just couldn't function," she said.

But her daughter got the vaccine. "And she got sick twice," Quinones said.

Europe is also suffering an early flu season, though a milder strain predominates there. Flu reports are up, too, in China, Japan, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Algeria and the Republic of Congo. Britain has seen a surge in cases of norovirus.

On average, about 24,000 Americans die each flu season, according to the CDC. That's an estimate — the agency does not keep a running tally of adult flu deaths each year, only for children. Some state health departments do keep count, and they've reported dozens of flu deaths so far.

Flu usually peaks in midwinter. Symptoms can include fever, cough, runny nose, head and body aches and fatigue. Some people also suffer vomiting and diarrhea, and some develop pneumonia or other severe complications.

Most people with flu have a mild illness and can help themselves and protect others by staying home and resting. But people with severe symptoms should see a doctor. They may be given antiviral drugs or other medications to ease symptoms.

Flu vaccinations are recommended for everyone 6 months or older. Of the 20 children killed by the flu this season, only two were fully vaccinated.

___

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

___

Online:

CDC flu: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/index.htm

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Restored funding for prescription drug-monitoring program urged

California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris on Thursday called on Gov. Jerry Brown to restore funding to a prescription drug-monitoring program that health experts say is key to combating drug abuse and overdose deaths in the state.

Harris' appeal to restore funding to CURES, as it is known, follows an article in The Times last month that reported that the system, once heralded as an invaluable tool, had been severely undermined by budget cuts and was not being used to its full potential.

The CURES database contains detailed information on prescription narcotics, including the names of patients, the doctors prescribing the drugs and the pharmacies that dispense them. The system was designed to help physicians detect "doctor-shopping" patients who dupe multiple physicians into prescribing drugs such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax.

Harris' request followed Brown's unveiling of a proposed $97.7-billion budget, which projects a surplus — a feat that has been accomplished only one time in the last decade. With California's fiscal condition improving, Harris said it was up to the state to make sure the money was "spent wisely."

"This includes smart investments that benefit Californians, such as restoring funding for the state's prescription drug-monitoring program," she said in a statement.

Brown's office had no comment.

The governor's budget does increase Harris' Department of Justice general fund allocation by 4.5% to $174.3 million, but it does not earmark money for CURES. Harris could seek legislative authority to spend some of her budget on the program.

"We are going to have a discussion on the funding and where the money will come from," said Lynda Gledhill, a spokeswoman for Harris.

CURES is the nation's oldest and largest prescription drug-monitoring program and once served as a model for other states. Today, it has fallen behind similar programs elsewhere. CURES data could be used to monitor physicians whose prescribing puts patients at risk. But it is not.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control recommends that states use such data to keep tabs on doctors, and at least half a dozen states do so.

As part of spending cuts aimed at maintaining the state's solvency amid a deep recession, Brown gutted the Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which ran CURES, in 2011, shortly after Harris succeeded him as attorney general. Harris kept the program alive with about $400,000 in revenue from the Medical Board of California and other licensing boards. But it is down to one employee and has no enforcement capacity.

State officials have estimated it would cost about $2.8 million to make CURES more accessible and easier to use, and $1.6 million more per year to keep it running. However, officials say the program — with little or no additional financial resources — could now be used to identify potentially rogue doctors.

Bob Pack, an Internet entrepreneur, has advocated using CURES more vigorously to track reckless physicians and pharmacies as well as doctor-shopping patients. He became active on the issue after a driver high on painkillers and alcohol struck and killed his two young children in the Bay Area suburb of Danville in 2003.

Pack, who helped design an online portal to give physicians and pharmacists immediate access to CURES, said he was happy to see Harris ask Brown to restore funds for the program.

"But that's only a request," he said. "No one knows if that's really going to happen. Meanwhile, doctors are continuing to over-prescribe and thousands of Californians are dying from prescription drug overdoses. I hope this … has some bite to it."

An aide to Harris said restoring the CURES program is a high priority.

"She's committed to fixing the database and making it as strong as possible," said Travis LeBlanc, special assistant attorney general. "When we have limited resources and in a budget crunch, we need to focus our resources and use it in smart, efficient ways, and [CURES] is one of those," he said.

lisa.girion@latimes.com

scott.glover@latimes.com

Times staff writer Hailey Branson-Potts contributed to this report.

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HP Cloud Ushers in 2013 and GA Compute Service with Reduced Pricing

HP Cloud Services is continuously working to increase efficiency in our datacenters, so we can pass these efforts along to our customers via enhanced enterprise-class service and/or lower prices.  As a result, HP Cloud Services is starting the New Year by permanently lowering the prices on Linux instances of HP Cloud Compute by 12.5% and Object Storage by as much as 25%. 

Furthermore, to celebrate our Compute service’s move to General Availability (GA), we are offering a time-limited 40% discount on all Windows and Linux instances until March 31st, 2013.  We’re doing this to make it even easier for new and existing customers to try our new GA service and perform their initial integration work. You can read more about our differentiated, industry-leading SLA at “Under the Hood of HP Cloud Services SLAs” and about what we’re doing behind the scenes to actually deliver on and surpass our SLAs at “How HP Cloud Services Became Enterprise Class.” 

It’s worth noting that we also recently moved HP Cloud Block Storage to public beta and added several major new features, including bootable persistent volumes and enhancements in volume backup to object storage, as detailed here.  HP Cloud Block Storage is being discounted by 50% while in public beta, so now is the perfect time to give it a test drive if you haven’t already!

You can sign up now to start exploring our enterprise-class cloud.  For ongoing news about our new services, pricing and special offers, follow us on Twitter @hpcloud, subscribe to this blog, and follow our Facebook page.

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What's Got Tom Colicchio & Gail Simmons Spinning Out of Control?

Caught in the Act

01/11/2013 at 06:00 AM EST

Tom Colicchi & Gail Simmons

Larry Busacca/Getty

From Top Chef to top cyclist!

Top Chef judges chef Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons kicked off 2013 on a healthy note by they visiting SoulCycle's Tribeca location on Wednesday.

"While Gail was upfront wearing a SoulCycle t-shirt, Tom was in the back wearing black shorts, an Under Armour tank and a do-rag," an onlooker tells PEOPLE.

The co-judges are no strangers to the cycling craze, the source adds. "They both spin on a regular basis" and "spin together regularly when they're filming Top Chef".

After powering through the last song of the class – Beyoncé's "Halo" – Colicchio stopped to chat with Food & Wine magazine publisher Christina Grdovic.

Here's to hoping for a Quickfire Competition on a bike!

– Lesley Messer

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IHT Rendezvous: The Last Man Asian Literary Prize

HONG KONG — The five shortlisted novels of what will be the last Man Asian Literary Prize were announced last evening at the Man Group’s offices here. The British investment firm will end its support of Asia’s most prominent literary prize after the final award is given at a black-tie dinner in March.

As usually happens, the shortlist announcement drew about two dozen people from the city’s relatively small English-language literary scene: a few publishers, agents and journalists mostly from the foreign or English-language press. With rather less fanfare than the Man Booker gets, we stood around a screen to watch Maya Jaggi, a literary critic and head of the judging panel, read the list via a video link from London, from what looked like an office cubicle.

Man’s involvement lent clout to the prize when it was introduced in Hong Kong in 2007 — it is often incorrectly referred to as the Asian Booker — and the $30,000 purse is extraordinarily generous in a region without many literary awards. More importantly, it gave global exposure to Asian authors writing in Asian languages. The 2011 winner, “Please Look After Mom” by the South Korean novelist Kyung-sook Shin, went on to sell two million copies worldwide.

Initially, the Man Asia accepted unpublished manuscripts (which it no longer does) and focused on unearthing unknown regional talent, like the Filipino writer Miguel Syjuco in 2008.

But as the prize grew in prominence, so have its recipients, causing more crossover with international awards. The Guardian called this year the “Booker re-match,” as two of the works shortlisted for the Man Asia – “The Garden of Evening Mists” by the Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng and “Narcopolis,” a debut novel by the Indian poet Jeet Thayil – were also shortlisted for the Man Booker.

Another author shortlisted for the Man Asia, Orhan Pamuk, was given the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. His submission, “Silent House,” is a 30-year-old Turkish-language novel that had only recently been published in English. Rounding out the short list are “Between Clay and Dust” by the Pakistani author Musharraf Ali Farooqi and “The Briefcase” by Hiromi Kawakami of Japan.

All but one – “Between Clay and Dust,” from the Delhi-based Aleph Book Company – are from Western publishers.

The prize’s organizers say that they have been in talks with potential new sponsors for months, after it was announced in October that Man would no longer support it.

“We have decided to concentrate our arts sponsorship on the world-leading Man Booker prize, where our support is about to go into its twelfth year,” David Waller, a Man Group spokesman, said at the time.

A new title sponsor is expected to be announced in April, and most chatter has been over whether it will be an Asian organization this time. It brings up a larger question:

Does Asia’s literary scene still need Western financing, publishing houses and publicity to succeed?

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Retooling Pap test to spot more kinds of cancer

WASHINGTON (AP) — For years, doctors have lamented that there's no Pap test for deadly ovarian cancer. Wednesday, scientists reported encouraging signs that one day, there might be.

Researchers are trying to retool the Pap, a test for cervical cancer that millions of women get, so that it could spot early signs of other gynecologic cancers, too.

How? It turns out that cells can flake off of tumors in the ovaries or the lining of the uterus, and float down to rest in the cervix, where Pap tests are performed. These cells are too rare to recognize under the microscope. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University used some sophisticated DNA testing on the Pap samples to uncover the evidence — gene mutations that show cancer is present.

In a pilot study, they analyzed Pap smears from 46 women who already were diagnosed with either ovarian or endometrial cancer. The new technique found all the endometrial cancers and 41 percent of the ovarian tumors, the team reported Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

This is very early-stage research, and women shouldn't expect any change in their routine Paps. It will take years of additional testing to prove if the so-called PapGene technique really could work as a screening tool, used to spot cancer in women who thought they were healthy.

"Now the hard work begins," said Hopkins oncologist Dr. Luis Diaz, whose team is collecting hundreds of additional Pap samples for more study and is exploring ways to enhance the detection of ovarian cancer.

But if it ultimately pans out, "the neat part about this is, the patient won't feel anything different," and the Pap wouldn't be performed differently, Diaz added. The extra work would come in a lab.

The gene-based technique marks a new approach toward cancer screening, and specialists are watching closely.

"This is very encouraging, and it shows great potential," said American Cancer Society genetics expert Michael Melner.

"We are a long way from being able to see any impact on our patients," cautioned Dr. Shannon Westin of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She reviewed the research in an accompanying editorial, and said the ovarian cancer detection would need improvement if the test is to work.

But she noted that ovarian cancer has poor survival rates because it's rarely caught early. "If this screening test could identify ovarian cancer at an early stage, there would be a profound impact on patient outcomes and mortality," Westin said.

More than 22,000 U.S. women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year, and more than 15,000 die. Symptoms such as pain and bloating seldom are obvious until the cancer is more advanced, and numerous attempts at screening tests have failed.

Endometrial cancer affects about 47,000 women a year, and kills about 8,000. There is no screening test for it either, but most women are diagnosed early because of postmenopausal bleeding.

The Hopkins research piggybacks on one of the most successful cancer screening tools, the Pap, and a newer technology used along with it. With a standard Pap, a little brush scrapes off cells from the cervix, which are stored in a vial to examine for signs of cervical cancer. Today, many women's Paps undergo an additional DNA-based test to see if they harbor the HPV virus, which can spur cervical cancer.

So the Hopkins team, funded largely by cancer advocacy groups, decided to look for DNA evidence of other gynecologic tumors. It developed a method to rapidly screen the Pap samples for those mutations using standard genetics equipment that Diaz said wouldn't add much to the cost of a Pap-plus-HPV test. He said the technique could detect both early-stage and more advanced tumors. Importantly, tests of Paps from 14 healthy women turned up no false alarms.

The endometrial cancers may have been easier to find because cells from those tumors don't have as far to travel as ovarian cancer cells, Diaz said. Researchers will study whether inserting the Pap brush deeper, testing during different times of the menstrual cycle, or other factors might improve detection of ovarian cancer.

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