Euro zone surveys to offer hope as Japan eases

LONDON (Reuters) - The prospect of stronger European manufacturing surveys and decisive monetary easing in Japan this week ought to bolster confidence that the global economy can look forward to better days.

It is definitely not yet time to break open the champagne.

The index derived from polls of purchasing managers across the euro zone, though recovering, is likely to remain well below the 50 threshold that signals expansion.

If the Bank of Japan bows to political pressure and relaxes policy more boldly, it is because the country's noxious cocktail of a huge debt burden, deflation and dwindling external surpluses threatens an eventual fiscal crunch.

And an expected contraction in Britain's economy when fourth-quarter figures are released on Friday will be a reminder, as was Germany's grim end to 2013, that Europe has to dig itself out of a deep hole.

"The real hard economic data are still very negative," said Bert Colijn, an economist in Brussels with the Conference Board, a business research group. "There are improvements, but it still doesn't look that bright."

However, he said the economic news from the euro zone rim was not quite as troubling, and the mood was brightening among the core countries of the single currency area.

Lena Komileva, managing director of G+ Economics, a London consultancy, said it was hard to argue against investors' new-found appetite for riskier assets given that the volatility of equity prices was approaching historical lows and yields on corporate bonds had fallen sharply.

"Financial stress indicators signal a significant improvement in the health of the global economy," she said.

Friday's solid fourth-quarter economic data from China reinforced that view.

PURCHASERS' PROGRESS

Economists polled by Reuters expect an uptick in Thursday's advance purchasing managers' indexes for France and Germany as well as for the euro zone as a whole.

Germany's IFO business confidence survey on Friday is also projected to have risen for the third month in a row.

"The fact that business confidence measures are coming in more positive is a good sign," Colijn commented.

Commerzbank said its leading indicator for the German economy reached an all-time high in December after the European Central Bank's pledge to buy the bonds of troubled economies eased fears of a break-up of the euro.

"We assume that increasingly more companies are gaining confidence and viewing business prospects more positively," said Commerzbank economist Ralph Solveen.

BNP Paribas is also bullish on Germany and is looking for a marked pick-up in growth.

In addition to the ECB's safety net, the global manufacturing cycle is pointing up, while a strong labor market and easy financial conditions are supporting consumption, economists Evelyn Herrmann and Ken Wattret said in a report.

"Moreover, should the global economy surpass expectations and euro zone market stress ease further, upside surprises would be likely to follow. A key issue in this respect would be higher export growth and confidence triggering a stronger rebound in investment," they said.

That is exactly what Japan would like to see, too.

To that end, the government of new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Bank of Japan have agreed to set 2 percent inflation as a new target, supplanting a softer 1 percent ‘goal', according to sources familiar with the central bank's thinking.

They said the BOJ, which meets on Monday and Tuesday, will also consider making an open-ended commitment to buy assets until the target is in sight.

FOR AND AGAINST EASING

Credit Suisse's global equity strategists said an easier monetary policy is justified to cushion the significant fiscal tightening on which Japan will have to embark before long to whittle down a government debt that has reached some 220 percent of national income.

This task is all the more pressing because Japan is moving towards a current account deficit, which will make it more reliant on foreign investors to finance its budget shortfall, Credit Suisse argued.

Trade figures on Thursday will underline the deterioration in Japan's external accounts, with economists polled by Reuters forecasting the sixth consecutive monthly deficit.

Nomura reckons the deficit for all of 2012 widened to 6.6 trillion yen ($73.4 billion) from 2.7 trillion in 2011.

Japanese equities have surged in anticipation of a more aggressive monetary policy stance, but not everyone is happy.

The accompanying slump in the yen has prompted Russia's deputy central bank governor to warn of a new round of ‘currency wars' and the medium-term risk of running ultra-loose monetary policies is likely to be a theme of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which opens on Wednesday.

"I'm pretty worried about the new policies of Japan's newly elected government," German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said last week. "When you think of the surplus of liquidity on global financial markets, it is fuelled further by a wrong understanding of central bank policy.

(Editing by Susan Fenton)

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Algeria Begins ‘Final Assault’ on Gas Field; 7 Hostages Reported Killed

Louafi Larbi/Reuters

Algerian police officers escorted a freed Norwegian hostage as he left the In Amenas police station on Saturday.

BAMAKO, Mali — The hostage crisis in the Algerian desert reached a bloody conclusion Saturday as the army carried out a final assault on the gas field taken over by Islamist militants, killing 11 of them, but only after the militants had killed seven more hostages, the official Algerian news agency reported.

French, British and American officials said the Algerian government had told them the military operation was over, but a senior Algerian government official said security forces were “doing cleanup” to make sure no kidnappers were hiding in the sprawling industrial complex.

Western officials deplored the loss of life during the four-day siege, which Philip Hammond, the British defense secretary, called “appalling and unacceptable.” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who appeared with Mr. Hammond at a news conference in London, said he did not yet have reliable information about the fate of Americans at the facility, although the Algerian official said two had been found “safe and sound.”

Late Saturday, Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, emerged from a meeting of the British government’ crisis committee and told reporters that five Britons and one British resident had died in the final battle for the plant. He declined to provide details, saying the government had not yet received a full picture of what happened and that police forces were still fanning out across Britain visiting each of the victims’ families and giving them “the support they need at this very difficult time.”The provisional death toll for the four days released by Algeria Saturday, even by the government’s reckoning, was heavy. Out of dozens taken hostage on a site that employed hundreds of workers, 23 were dead while 32 kidnappers were killed, according to the government news service. That represents close to the initial estimate of hostage-takers.

The government said it had recovered machine guns, rocket launchers, suicide belts and small arms.

The Algerian news agency report did not give the nationalities of the hostages it said were executed Saturday, and it remained unclear whether there were other hostages at the remote plant and whether they were alive. Earlier news reports said at least 10 and as many as dozens of hostages from several nations were in the hands of the kidnappers as of Friday.

United States officials had said that “seven or eight” Americans had been at the In Amenas field when it was seized by the militants on Wednesday.

One American, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Tex., was confirmed dead on Friday, and the French government said one of its citizens, identified as Yann Desjeux, had also died before Saturday’s raid. Britain earlier said at least one of its citizens had been killed, and an Algerian state news agency said Algerians had also been killed as of Friday.

The Algerian official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity, said a precise tally would take time.

“There are corpses that are totally charred,” he said. “We’ve got to do identification work. It’s very difficult.” Algerian officials have said some of the kidnappers blew themselves up. The Algerian news agency said the militants had set fire to part of the complex Friday night, which prompted the troops to launch the military assault Saturday.

The raid, if it swept up all the attackers, would bring to an end a siege involving dozens of hostages and kidnappers that drew criticism from Western governments for the tough manner in which it was handled by the Algerian security services. Attacks on the kidnappers by the government forces caused an unknown number of deaths among the hostages, in addition to those who were executed by the militants, who may be linked to Al Qaeda.

A militant who claimed responsibility for the attack, and who was blamed by the Algerians for leading it, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, was until recently a leading commander of Al Qaeda’s North and West African branch, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

One Algerian who managed to escape told France 24 television late Friday night that the kidnappers said, “We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.” The haggard-looking man, interviewed at the airport in Algiers, said the kidnappers then immediately executed five hostages.

The militants who attacked the plant said it was in retaliation for French troops sweeping into Mali this month to stop an advance of Islamist rebels south toward the capital. However the militants later said they had been planning an attack in Algeria for two months on the assumption that the West would intervene in Mali.

Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare contributed reporting from Paris, Elisabeth Bumiller from London and John F. Burns from Oxford, England.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 19, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the nationality of a government official who said security forces were searching the gas complex. The official is Algerian, not Turkish.

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Raspberry Pi creator says sequel unlikely in 2013

Raspberry Pi’s $ 35 Linux-based computer is a runaway success. Creator Eben Upton told ZDNet in a recent interview that his team thought they would sell 1,000 units when they were designing the mini PC, but sales have now topped 700,000. ”We honestly did think we would sell about 1,000, maybe 10,000 in our wildest dreams,” Upton said. “We thought we would make a small number and give them out to people who might want to come and read computer science at Cambridge.” On a slightly disappointing note to those hoping for an upgraded model in 2013, Upton said in the interview that the company has no plans to launch a sequel to the latest Raspberry Pi “Model B” this year.

[More from BGR: BlackBerry 10 browser smokes iOS 6 and Windows Phone 8 in comparison test [video]]

This article was originally published on BGR.com

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Deadly Pills: A National Epidemic

By Kristen Mascia

01/19/2013 at 04:00 PM EST

Jace Uher-Flom's mom dies two weeks after her birth of an overdose of prescription drugs

Grant Delin

Drugs are now the No. 1 accidental killer in the U.S., with the vast majority of deaths caused by prescription meds. A look at how medicines that are now a part of everyday life can also turn families upside down forever.

The statistics are staggering, the medicines powerful and highly addictive: This year more Americans will die of drug over-doses than in any other type of accident – including car crashes. In most cases, those deaths are caused by pills in many people's medicine cabinets given to them by trusted doctors, left over from routine surgeries or prescribed to manage chronic conditions.

"Prescription drug overdoses are a serious nationwide problem," says Dr. Leonard Paulozzi of the C.D.C.'s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, "for which we haven't yet found a solution."

How did we get here? For the millions of Americans who suffer from chronic pain, heavy-duty painkillers are the wonder drugs that help them lead more comfortable lives. But in the past 20 years, as opiate painkillers have become more routinely prescribed, the number of people dying from them – as a result of misuse or accidentally – has skyrocketed.

Often those deaths are due to bad interactions with other substances: Combined with alcohol some antidepressants can cause dangerous spikes in blood pressure, and mixing pain pills with a few drinks "can depress the brain," says Paulozzi, "and lead to death."

It's a problem even the drug industry acknowledges, says Sharon Brigner, of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: "These medicines can be an important tool – we tell anyone we talk to that medicines save and improve lives every day. But if misused, they can kill."

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Lilly drug chosen for Alzheimer's prevention study

Researchers have chosen an experimental drug by Eli Lilly & Co. for a large federally funded study testing whether it's possible to prevent Alzheimer's disease in older people at high risk of developing it.

The drug, called solanezumab (sol-ah-NAYZ-uh-mab), is designed to bind to and help clear the sticky deposits that clog patients' brains.

Earlier studies found it did not help people with moderate to severe Alzheimer's but it showed some promise against milder disease. Researchers think it might work better if given before symptoms start.

"The hope is we can catch people before they decline," which can come 10 years or more after plaques first show up in the brain, said Dr. Reisa Sperling, director of the Alzheimer's center at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

She will help lead the new study, which will involve 1,000 people ages 70 to 85 whose brain scans show plaque buildup but who do not yet have any symptoms of dementia. They will get monthly infusions of solanezumab or a dummy drug for three years. The main goal will be slowing the rate of cognitive decline. The study will be done at 50 sites in the U.S. and possibly more in Canada, Australia and Europe, Sperling said.

In October, researchers said combined results from two studies of solanezumab suggested it might modestly slow mental decline, especially in patients with mild disease. Taken separately, the studies missed their main goals of significantly slowing the mind-robbing disease or improving activities of daily living.

Those results were not considered good enough to win the drug approval. So in December, Lilly said it would start another large study of it this year to try to confirm the hopeful results seen patients with mild disease. That is separate from the federal study Sperling will head.

About 35 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer's is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5 million have Alzheimer's. Current medicines such as Aricept and Namenda just temporarily ease symptoms. There is no known cure.

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Online:

Alzheimer's info: http://www.alzheimers.gov

Alzheimer's Association: http://www.alz.org

___

Follow Marilynn Marchione's coverage at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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Wall Street Week Ahead: Earnings, money flows to push stocks higher

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With earnings momentum on the rise, the S&P 500 seems to have few hurdles ahead as it continues to power higher, its all-time high a not-so-distant goal.

The U.S. equity benchmark closed the week at a fresh five-year high on strong housing and labor market data and a string of earnings that beat lowered expectations.

Sector indexes in transportation <.djt>, banks <.bkx> and housing <.hgx> this week hit historic or multiyear highs as well.

Michael Yoshikami, chief executive at Destination Wealth Management in Walnut Creek, California, said the key earnings to watch for next week will come from cyclical companies. United Technologies reports on Wednesday while Honeywell is due to report Friday.

"Those kind of numbers will tell you the trajectory the economy is taking," Yoshikami said.

Major technology companies also report next week, but the bar for the sector has been lowered even further.

Chipmakers like Advanced Micro Devices , which is due Tuesday, are expected to underperform as PC sales shrink. AMD shares fell more than 10 percent Friday after disappointing results from its larger competitor, Intel . Still, a chipmaker sector index <.sox> posted its highest weekly close since last April.

Following a recent underperformance, an upside surprise from Apple on Wednesday could trigger a return to the stock from many investors who had abandoned ship.

Other major companies reporting next week include Google , IBM , Johnson & Johnson and DuPont on Tuesday, Microsoft and 3M on Thursday and Procter & Gamble on Friday.

CASH POURING IN, HOUSING DATA COULD HELP

Perhaps the strongest support for equities will come from the flow of cash from fixed income funds to stocks.

The recent piling into stock funds -- $11.3 billion in the past two weeks, the most since 2000 -- indicates a riskier approach to investing from retail investors looking for yield.

"From a yield perspective, a lot of stocks still yield a great deal of money and so it is very easy to see why money is pouring into the stock market," said Stephen Massocca, managing director at Wedbush Morgan in San Francisco.

"You are just not going to see people put a lot of money to work in a 10-year Treasury that yields 1.8 percent."

Housing stocks <.hgx>, already at a 5-1/2 year high, could get a further bump next week as investors eye data expected to support the market's perception that housing is the sluggish U.S. economy's bright spot.

Home resales are expected to have risen 0.6 percent in December, data is expected to show on Tuesday. Pending home sales contracts, which lead actual sales by a month or two, hit a 2-1/2 year high in November.

The new home sales report on Friday is expected to show a 2.1 percent increase.

The federal debt ceiling negotiations, a nagging worry for investors, seemed to be stuck on the back burner after House Republicans signaled they might support a short-term extension.

Equity markets, which tumbled in 2011 after the last round of talks pushed the United States close to a default, seem not to care much this time around.

The CBOE volatility index <.vix>, a gauge of market anxiety, closed Friday at its lowest since April 2007.

"I think the market is getting somewhat desensitized from political drama given, this seems to be happening over and over," said Destination Wealth Management's Yoshikami.

"It's something to keep in mind, but I don't think it's what you want to base your investing decisions on."

(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos, additional reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak and Caroline Valetkevitch; Editing by Kenneth Barry)

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British Leader Sees Wider Threat in Algeria Attack

Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Prime Minister David Cameron en route to Parliament to deliver a statement on the Algeria hostage crisis.

LONDON — With more than 60 hostages still missing and many feared dead, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament on Friday that the Qaeda-linked attack on a remote Algerian gas installation demonstrated the need for Britain and its Western allies, including the United States, to direct more of their diplomatic, military and intelligence resources to the intensifying threat emanating from “the ungoverned space” of the North African desert, treating it with as much concern as the terrorist challenge in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mr. Cameron offered little new information about the showdown at the In Amenas plant, nearly 1,000 miles from Algiers, the Algerian capital, in the oil-and-gas-rich emptiness of the Sahara, saying the information reaching London about what he described as a “continuing situation” remained sketchy. He added that Britain learned overnight that the number of British citizens caught up in the hostage-taking and the subsequent shootout was “significantly” fewer than the 30 people feared on Thursday. As part of the effort to learn more, he said, a special plane had been assigned to carry Britain’s ambassador in Algiers and other British diplomats to the area of the gas plant on Friday.

But in an hourlong session in the House of Commons, Mr. Cameron pointed to the somber implications of underestimating recent events in Mali and Algeria as a regional problem for North Africa rather than as an increasingly fertile arena for Islamic militants and their hostility to the West. He said he had discussed his concerns in a telephone conversation with President Obama on Thursday.

The British leader said the growth of Islamic terrorist networks in the countries of the Sahel, the broad area of North Africa that runs more than 3,000 miles from Mauritania in the west to Sudan and Somalia in the east, should be a renewed focus of Western counterterrorist concerns and resources. At one point, he said military assistance to the affected countries needed to be part of NATO military planning, though he again emphatically ruled out any British combat role in support of France’s campaign against militants in Mali.

Pointing to the leading role played in the Algerian attack by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a terrorist ringleader and smuggler with links to North Africa’s main Islamic terrorist group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Mr. Cameron warned that the Algerian attack was symptomatic of a far broader threat.

“What we know is that the terrorist threat in the Sahel comes from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which aspires to establish Islamic law across the Sahel and northern Africa, and to attack Western interests in the region and, frankly, wherever it can,” Mr. Cameron said. “Just as we have reduced the scale of the Al Qaeda threat in other parts of the world, including in Pakistan and Afghanistan, so it has grown in other parts of the world. We need to be equally concerned about that, and equally focused on it.”

To some British commentators, Mr. Cameron’s remarks sounded like an effort to prompt the United States to become more deeply involved in North African security matters. In the 2011 Libyan conflict, the United States stepped back from the lead role it has traditionally taken in NATO military operations and left Britain, France and Italy to conduct the bulk of the bombing in support of the Libyan rebels’ successful campaign to topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Since then, high-ranking British officials have expressed concerns that the Obama administration is stepping back from European political and security issues and turning its attentions increasingly to the nations of the Pacific.

With the approach of Mr. Obama’s second inauguration on Sunday, The Spectator, a London-based weekly that is influential in Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party, devoted its cover this week to an article headlined “The Pacific President,” and an illustration showing Mr. Obama in a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt and shorts surfing off a palm-lined beach. “As Barack Obama is sworn in again as president, his allies in the West will ask themselves the same nervous question they posed four years ago: how much does he care about us?” the accompanying article asked.

White House officials said on Thursday that Mr. Obama had used his telephone conversation with Mr. Cameron to underscore American concerns that Britain remain a robust force within the 27-nation European Union, a hot-button issue for Mr. Cameron. The prime minister had planned — then canceled, amid the Algerian crisis — a landmark speech in Amsterdam on Friday in which he was to have outlined his plan to negotiate a much sparer role for Britain in the European bloc.

In his remarks to lawmakers on Friday, Mr. Cameron offered what could have been construed as an oblique riposte to Mr. Obama, or at least to officials in the Obama administration who have urged that Europe take greater responsibility for confronting terrorist and other security threats at its own doorstep.  He may also have been addressing domestic critics in Britain, or other NATO countries that have been less active than Britain in counterterrorism efforts aimed at confronting the spread of Islamic militant groups.

“There is a great need for not just Britain but other countries to give a priority to understanding better, and working better, with the countries in this region,” he said. “Those who believe that there is a terrorist, extremist Al Qaeda problem in parts of north Africa, but that it is a problem for those places and we can somehow back off and ignore it, are profoundly wrong. That is a problem for those places, and for us.”

Mr. Cameron noted that Britain had been “the first country in the world” to offer France military assistance in its campaign in Mali, deploying one of the largest military transport aircraft it has, an American-made C-17 Globemaster, to ferry French troops and military equipment to Bamako, the Malian capital. He said it was time for Britain and France to move beyond their spheres of influence in Africa dating back to the colonial era, “and recognize that is in our interest to boost the capacity of all African states” confronted by the terrorist threat.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the year that Libyan rebels overthrew Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. It was 2011, not last year.

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In Which Actual Joe Biden and ‘Onion’ Joe Biden Pal Around on Reddit and Twitter

The Onion‘s brilliant creation, “Diamond” Joe Biden, stopped by Reddit, in character, for one of the site’s signature Ask Me Anything sessions on Friday afternoon. And, hey, look who asked something over Twitter just as the AMA began:

Q for @reddit AMA with my @theonion pal: A Trans-Am? Ever look under the hood of a Corvette? #imavetteguy –VP twitter.com/VP/status/2923…

— Office of VP Biden (@VP) January 18, 2013

So that happened, and it’s so beyond meta that our heads hurt. It confirms that the vice-president (or at least his office) is aware of his satirical alter-ego: the foul-mouthed, Trans-Am-driving, skirt-chaser known to hundreds of Onion articles. And, of course, “Diamond” Joe answered:

RELATED: The Real Joe Biden vs. The Onion’s Joe Biden: A Quiz

So why would Actual Joe Biden indulge the funniest incarnation of the Uncle Joe Biden whom the Internet loves so much? Maybe he thinks he’s funny! After all, Actual Joe Biden is pretty funny himself, and “Diamond” Joe’s answers on Reddit this afternoon didn’t disappoint. Some highlights:

RELATED: The Gingriches Endorse Meryl Streep; Alec Baldwin’s Mayoral Two-Step

And another:

RELATED: How Joe Biden Stages Those Average-Joe Pictures… in Pictures

One more:

And, yes, there’s a theme here:

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Nicholas Hoult: The Brains in My New Zombie Movie Were 'Pretty Tasty'

It's the age-old story: Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl has trouble introducing the boy to her best friend, because the boy is a zombie and ate her last boyfriend.

Wait, what?

In the upcoming comedy Warm Bodies, Nicholas Hoult (A Single Man, X-Men First Class) plays R, a lonely zombie who is dissatisfied with his life of shuffling around an airport, eating brains and grunting out conversations with his best friend (Rob Corddry).

But R's still heart begins to beat when he lays eyes on Julie (Teresa Palmer), the daughter of a zombie-killing general and girlfriend of R's last meal. So he embarks on a mission to befriend Julie and, as he haltingly reminds her, "keep safe."

"I understood that feeling of wanting to connect and caring about someone a lot and wanting to look after them," Hoult tells PEOPLE about why he chose the role. "The great thing about [Julie] is she's bubbly and there's a spark about her. And she's obviously very open to the world around her, and I think that's a good thing. She's positive."

Julie and R form an unlikely bond, with Julie's best friend Nora (Crazy, Stupid, Live's Analeigh Tipton) giving him the requisite inquisition before accepting that R is, indeed, good.

"As much as [Julie is] saving my character and making him human again, she's just as trapped in the human world where the humans have gone down this road of closing themselves in and giving up on finding a cure," says Hoult. "She's the one person who steps out from the crowd and sees hope in my character."

But it's not all romantic glances and swoony zombie love – since R meets Julie after dining on her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco). And yes, there is the requisite brain-eating (but Warm Bodies delivers a good reason for why the undead prefer the gray matter).

"It was kind of a wet, soft, cold cake mixed with grapefruit and peachy stuff," Hoult says of filming those scenes. "It was quite sweet. Pretty tasty. It's going to be one of my odd requests wherever I go. 'Delicious brains,' please!"

Warm Bodies opens Feb 1.

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Flu season 'bad one for the elderly,' CDC says

The number of older people hospitalized with the flu has risen sharply, prompting federal officials to take unusual steps to make more flu medicines available and to urge wider use of them as soon as symptoms appear.

The U.S. is about halfway through this flu season, and "it's shaping up to be a worse-than-average season" and a bad one for the elderly, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It's not too late to get a flu shot, and "if you have symptoms, please stay home from work, keep your children home from school" and don't spread the virus, he said.

New figures from the CDC show widespread flu activity in all states but Tennessee and Hawaii. Some parts of the country are seeing an increase in flu activity "while overall activity is beginning to go down," Frieden said. Flu activity is high in 30 states and New York City, up from 24 the previous week.

Nine more children or teens have died of the flu, bringing the nation's total this flu season to 29. That's close to the 34 pediatric deaths reported during all of the last flu season, although that one was unusually light. In a typical season, about 100 children die of the flu and officials said there is no way to know whether deaths this season will be higher or lower than usual.

The government doesn't keep a running tally of adult deaths from the flu, but estimates that it kills about 24,000 people most years.

So far, half of confirmed flu cases are in people 65 and older. Lab-confirmed flu hospitalizations totaled 19 for every 100,000 in the population, but 82 per 100,000 among those 65 and older, "which is really quite a high rate," Frieden said.

"We expect to see both the number and the rates of both hospitalizations and deaths rise further in the next week or so as the flu epidemic progresses,'" so prompt treatment is key to preventing deaths, he said.

About 90 percent of flu deaths are in the elderly; the very young and people with other health problems such as diabetes are also at higher risk.

If you're worried about how sick you are and are in one of these risk groups, see a doctor, Frieden urged. One third to one half of people are not getting prompt treatment with antiviral medicines, he said.

Two drugs — Tamiflu and Relenza — can cut the severity and risk of death from the flu but must be started within 48 hours of first symptoms to do much good. Tamiflu is available in a liquid form for use in children under 1, and pharmacists can reformulate capsules into a liquid if supplies are short in an area, said Dr. Margaret Hamburg, head of the Food and Drug Administration.

To help avoid a shortage, the FDA is letting Tamiflu's maker, Genentech, distribute 2 million additional doses of capsules that have an older version of package insert.

"It is fully approved, it is not outdated," just lacks information for pharmacists on how to mix it into a liquid if needed for young children, she said.

This year's flu season started about a month earlier than normal and the dominant flu strain is one that tends to make people sicker. Vaccinations are recommended for anyone 6 months or older. There's still plenty of vaccine — an update shows that 145 million doses have been produced, "twice the supply that was available only several years ago," Hamburg said.

About 129 million doses have been distributed already, and a million doses are given each day, Frieden said. The vaccine is not perfect but "it's by far the best tool we have to prevent influenza," he said.

Carlos Maisonet, 73, got a flu shot this week at New York's Brooklyn Hospital Center at the urging of his wife, who was vaccinated in August.

"This is his first time getting the flu shot," said his wife, Zulma Ramos.

Last week, the CDC said the flu again surpassed an "epidemic" threshold, based on monitoring of deaths from flu and a frequent complication, pneumonia. The flu epidemic happens every year and officials say this year's vaccine is a good match for strains that are going around.

___

Online:

Flu vaccine finder: http://www.flu.gov

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

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AP Photographer Bebeto Matthews in New York contributed to this report.

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Follow Marilynn Marchione's coverage at —http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP

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