CDC puts season's flu deaths at 80,000
NEW YORK -- An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter -- the disease's highest death toll in at least four decades.
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday night.
In recent years, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC. CDC officials do not have exact counts of how many people die from flu each year. Flu is so common that not all flu cases are reported, and flu is not always listed on death certificates. So the CDC uses statistical models, which are periodically revised, to make estimates.
Fatal complications from the flu can include pneumonia, stroke and heart attack.
CDC officials called the 80,000 figure preliminary, and it may be slightly revised.
Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. The season peaked in early February and it was mostly over by the end of March. Making a bad year worse, the flu vaccine didn't work very well.
Last winter was not the worst flu season on record, however. The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, historians estimate.
Louisiana abortion law upheld in ruling
NEW ORLEANS -- A federal appeals court panel ruled Wednesday that a Louisiana law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals does not violate women's constitutional abortion rights.
The 2-1 ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals notes a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down an admitting privileges law in Texas -- a case known as Whole Woman's Health. But, the majority said, Louisiana's law does not impose the same "substantial burden" on women as the Texas law. The ruling reversed a Baton Rouge-based federal judge's ruling in the case and ordered the lawsuit by opponents of the law dismissed.
"Almost all Texas hospitals required that for a doctor to maintain privileges there, he or she had to admit a minimum number of patients annually," Judge Jerry Smith wrote in the opinion joined by Judge Edith Brown Clement. "Few Louisiana hospitals made that demand." Smith wrote that there is no evidence that any Louisiana clinics will close because of the law.
The dissenting judge, Patrick Higginbotham, agreed with the law's opponents who said the law substantially burdens women's abortion access while having "no demonstrable medical benefit."
Supporters of the law said abortion doctors need to be able to admit patients to a hospital within 30 miles in case of medical complications.
Texan executed for slaying in 1998
HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- A Texas inmate who taunted a jury to sentence him to death was executed Wednesday evening for torturing and drowning an east Texas woman in his bathtub and then stuffing her body into a barrel.
Troy Clark was condemned for the May 1998 slaying of a former roommate, Christina Muse of Tyler. Authorities said that Clark, a drug dealer, had worried that Muse would snitch on him.
As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital was administered, Clark was laughing and remarked that the drug "burned going in."
"I feel it," he said. Then he grunted, gasped and began to snore. Seconds later, all movement stopped. He was pronounced dead 21 minutes later at 6:36 p.m.
Prosecutors said Clark subdued Muse, 20, with a stun gun, bound her with duct tape and left her in a closet for several hours while he played video games and sold drugs to a customer.
Clark later moved Muse to a bathroom where he hit her with a board and threatened his girlfriend, Tory Bush, into helping him drown Muse in the tub. Muse's body was then stuffed into a barrel with cement mix and lime before being dumped in a ravine.
The 51-year-old Clark became the 17th inmate put to death this year in the U.S.
A Section on 09/27/2018