CHECKUP : THIS YEAR'S FLU VIRUS HAS A REAL TYPE A PERSONALITY.

It's ah, ah, ah-choo ... flu season again, and a more dangerous strain of the virus than those seen last year will be circulating this time.

The Type A-Wuhan virus, which can lead to deadly complications in the elderly, is the most dangerous of three viruses expected around the nation. The others are Type A-Texas and Type B, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

How bad the flu season will be is hard to predict, said Nancy Arden of the CDC's National Center for Infectious Diseases. But she warned: ``The more viruses like Wuhan, the more people die.''

The good news is that the current flu vaccine counteracts all three.

Flu contributes to the deaths of about 20,000 people a year in the United States.

A strain similar to Wuhan caused 38 percent of all cases of the flu in the United States last year. If the elderly or others who are chronically ill get the harsh Wuhan strain, they are more likely to get pneumonia or other life-threatening illnesses, Arden said.

The CDC recommends vaccinations for people 65 and older, people in nursing homes, children with asthma and anyone with a chronic illness.

Health forecast: Worldwide deaths from noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, heart disease and stroke will increase substantially in the next century, according to two new international reports.

By the year 2020, these diseases may account for 73 percent of all deaths, up from almost 56 percent in 1990, the researchers said.

The two main reasons for this dramatic upswing are the large aging population and high tobacco use, they said. Deaths from tobacco use could nearly triple to more than 8 million a year within 25 years, they added.

The first study, led by Dr. Christopher J. L. Murray of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and Dr. Alan D. Lopez of the World Health Organization, provides estimates of the current health status of the world's populations as well as projected estimates to the year 2020.

The two major problems that will burden global communities in the year 2020, causing people to lose more years to disability or premature death, are heart disease and depression, said Murray and Lopez.

In the second report, Dean T. Jamison, a professor of health economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues researched highly prevalent diseases that get minimal research dollars and proposed ways to allocate resources for health research.

Diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrhea account for a major percentage of problems - such as early death and disability - around the world, they said. Yet less than 1 percent of total health research and development money is devoted to these maladies, they added.

Autocratic appliances: Smart refrigerators that withhold unhealthy snacks from those of you who are supposed to be dieting may be the first of a new generation of intelligent machines that will tyrannize humanity. Such a world - predicted in such science-fiction works as Arthur C. Clarke's ``2001 - A Space Odyssey'' has been feared for generations, but it is now a real possibility, engineer Roland Burns of the University of Plymouth reported at Britain's annual science festival.

Predictive pounds How much a baby weighs at birth may help determine whether he or she will develop high blood pressure or obesity later in life.

Infants who weigh less than 5.5 pounds are about 40 percent more likely than normal-weight babies to have high blood pressure as adults, said Dr. Gary Curhan of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The stresses caused by below-normal weight may affect the performance of critical organs that increase the risk of hypertension, he said.

Newborns weighing in at more than 10 pounds are more likely to develop midlife obesity than normal-weight babies, he reported in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association.

Unlucky duck: A woman with conjunctivitis probably caught the eye infection from a pet duck, according to a report last week in the international medical journal the Lancet.

The 43-year-old woman reported that she thought a piece of straw entered her eye while she was cleaning her duck house. A day later, her eye became red and swollen.

The cause of the eye infection was determined to be a type of influenza virus that is particularly virulent in ducks.

``The most likely source of the virus in this case seems to be waterfowl with which the patient had contact,'' concluded the authors, who believe this to be the first documented case of direct transmission of influenza virus from a bird to a human.

In 1981, influenzal conjunctivitis was reported in a laboratory worker after an infected seal sneezed in his face, the authors noted.

Light to sleep by: Sleep disorders afflict blind people disproportionately, new research shows.

More than 80 percent of blind people in a new study had sleep problems such as insomnia or sleep disruptions, researchers reported in the international medical journal the Lancet.

By comparison, 57 percent of people who were not blind reported sleep problems.

Bright light influences the body's internal ``clock,'' which helps regulate sleep/wake cycles, the researchers noted. In the absence of light, blind people may need additional help adjusting their sleeping patterns, they said.

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Photo: A woman with conjunctivitis probably caught the eyeinfection from a pet duck, according to a report in the medical journal the Lancet. The cause of the eye infection was determined to be a type of influenza virus that is particularly virulent in ducks.