• Eduardo Azziz-Baumgartner, Ana María Cabrera, Po-Yung Cheng, Enio Garcia, Gabriela Kusznierz, Rogelio Calli, Clarisa Baez, María Pía Buyayisqui, Eleonora Poyard, Emanuel Pérez, Ricardo Basurto-Davila, Rakhee Palekar, Otavio Oliva, Airlane Pereira Alencar, Regilo de Souza, Thais dos Santos, David K Shay, Marc-Alain Widdowson, Joseph Breese, and Horacio Echenique.
• Influenza Division, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA, USA. eha9@cdc.gov
• Influenza Other Respi Viruses. 2013 Sep 1;7(5):710-7.

BackgroundWe estimated rates of influenza-associated deaths and hospitalizations in Argentina, a country that recommends annual influenza vaccination for persons at high risk of complications from influenza illness.MethodsWe identified hospitalized persons and deaths in persons diagnosed with pneumonia and influenza (P&I, ICD-10 codes J10-J18) and respiratory and circulatory illness (R&C, codes I00-I99 and J00-J99). We defined the influenza season as the months when the proportion of samples that tested positive for influenza exceeded the annual median. We used hospitalizations and deaths during the influenza off-season to estimate, using linear regression, the number of excess deaths that occurred during the influenza season. To explore whether excess mortality varied by sex and whether people were age <65 or ≥ 65 years, we used Poisson regression of the influenza-associated rates.ResultsDuring 2002-2009, 2411 P&I and 8527 R&C mean excess deaths occurred annually from May to October. If all of these excess deaths were associated with influenza, the influenza-associated mortality rate was 6/100,000 person-years (95% CI 4-8/100,000 person-years for P&I and 21/100,000 person-years (95% CI 12-31/100,000 person-years) for R&C. During 2005-2008, we identified an average of 7868 P&I excess hospitalizations and 22,994 R&C hospitalizations per year, resulting in an influenza-associated hospitalization rate of 2/10,000 person-years (95% CI 1-3/10,000 person-years) for P&I and 6/10,000 person-years (95% CI 3-8/10,000 person-years) for R&C.ConclusionOur findings suggest that annual rates of influenza-associated hospitalizations and death in Argentina were substantial and similar to neighboring Brazil.Published 2012. This article is a US Government work and is in the public domain in the USA.

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