The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is encouraging people to consider wearing face masks, among other precautions, as a number of winter viruses are spreading across the country.<\/p>\n
Health chiefs are particularly concerned about the levels of influenza, flu, after a mutation of the virus kick-started flu season more than a month early this year.<\/p>\n
“We haven’t seen a virus like this for a while, these dynamics are unusual,” said Prof Nicola Lewis, the director of the World Influenza Centre at the Francis Crick Institute. She added: “It does concern me, absolutely. “I’m not panicking, but I am worried.”<\/p>\n
In a new post on X, formerly Twitter, the UKHSA is urging people to “help stop common infections like flu from spreading” by taking a number of steps.<\/p>\n
These are washing hands regularly, opening windows when socialising inside, and catching coughs and sneezes in a tissue.<\/p>\n
If you feel unwell, UKHSA adds, you should stay at home if you can, and wear a mask if you need to go out.<\/p>\n
According to the latest data, positive flu rates increased slightly in the seven days to Tuesday, November 25 – rising from 10.7% in the previous week to 11.6%.<\/p>\n
Health chiefs said positivity rates were highest in children aged 5-14.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Flu symptoms often come on quickly, and can include a sudden high temperature, body aches, a sore throat, a dry cough, fatigue, headaches, diarrhoea or stomach pain, feeling or being sick, loss of appetite and difficulty sleeping.<\/p>\n
Children with flu may also suffer from earache and seem less active.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is encouraging people to consider wearing face masks, among other precautions, as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[102766,8447,119306,59,102,1554,56,19377,54,55,119307],"class_list":{"0":"post-295423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-face-masks","9":"tag-flu","10":"tag-flu-spread","11":"tag-gb","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-health-section","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-ukhsa","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom","18":"tag-winter-viruses"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}