Japan may be spared from a winter influenza epidemic like the one that claimed nearly 600 lives in the 1999-2000 season, health ministry officials said Monday.
While in the last five years the number of influenza patients among the young and elderly has surged in January, a survey conducted in the second week of this month found no indicators of an epidemic starting.
Ministry officials said they usually classify the onset of an epidemic as when the number of patients per hospital averages 1 or more.
The latest survey, covering 5,000 hospitals nationwide, showed a sharp decline in the average number of flu patients to 0.41, the officials said. The number of junior high school age children and younger who have stayed home due to influenza has reached only 2.5 percent of the level for last winter, they said.
A total of 591 people died of flu last winter. In the previous winter, the death toll reached 1,366.
Naoko Shindo, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, said people may have developed immunity to a virulent strain of flu that first broke out in 1997.
"We have seen few fresh types of a powerful flu virus since a new type of the A Hong Kong was discovered in 1997. Most people may have developed immunity against the type," she said.