Breathe easy again. Flu season is coming to a close.

But the 2007-08 influenza season was a rough one, according to national and local experts, mainly because the viral strains used in the vaccine didn't match those circulating from person to person.

That resulted in the worst flu season since 2003-04, with more people getting sick, more people having severe symptoms, more people being hospitalized, and, nationally, more people dying.

It was also a longer season than we're used to in Summit County, said Dr. Marguerite Erme, head of the Akron Health Department's Office of Disease Control and Surveillance.

In a typical flu season, she said, influenza activity will peak twice, with one strain causing a spike early in the season, followed by a lull and then another spike caused by a different strain later in the season.

''This year, we just had a sustained level of activity,'' Erme said. ''We never got a breather, so to speak. It was just flu all along from late January until now.''

Though there is still some influenza in the community, she said, ''in the last two weeks we've seen a really significant decline in flu activity.''

For the first time since early February, the latest surveillance report shows no one being hospitalized with confirmed influenza.

Nationally, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considered 2007-08 the worst flu season in four years, based on the number of adult deaths from flu and pneumonia.

The problem was the vaccine, according to the CDC. Of the three strains contained in the flu shots, just one matched the strains circulating across the country.

The CDC also compares flu seasons by tracking pediatric deaths, which was one factor that improved. So far this season, 66 children have died, including 46 who were not vaccinated. In

2003-04, 153 children died.

Dr. Blaise Congeni, director of infectious diseases at Akron Children's Hospital, said this flu season brought more severe illness than he had seen since 2003-04.

Though he's not aware of any local deaths, there were more severe complications, including pneumonia and other associated infections, and more children in the intensive care unit. Most of them never received a flu shot.

Flu shots, he said, could have saved families a lot of worry — not to mention a lot of money.

''When you look at the cost of medical care and intensive care of one patient, we literally could have immunized all the children in Ohio,'' he said. ''That's the cost of just one child, in one hospital, in one city.''

Even though the vaccine wasn't a good match this season, it still offered protection against one strain, as well as limited protection against the others.

''It's not all or nothing,'' Erme said. ''It's not that you're not protected at all or you're protected 100 percent. Even with the mismatch, there are people who were protected. Even with the mismatch, the disease is less severe than if you had not gotten the vaccine at all.

''So that doesn't mean getting the vaccine was useless.''