[Tapper:] Welcome back. I'm Jake Tapper. Here are the hour's top stories on CNN. More bodies have been brought ashore in Indonesia by search crews looking for airplane wreckage, at least seven bodies have been recovered from the sea. Debris from the aircraft was also spotted. And the general area where a commercial flight with 162 people on board disappeared on Sunday. Rainstorms and heavy seas are making the search very difficult. More lousy weather, this in Southern California, 139 people all got stuck in the mountains when a sudden snowstorm buried their cars. Fire department rescuers with heavy machinery worked through the night to get everyone to shelters. Today, they will try to get their cars unstuck. Good luck with that. One of the big box office winners [inaudible] this week was of course the war drama, Unbroken, but not everywhere. There is a growing movement in Japan to boycott the movie and to even ban director Angelina Jolie from ever coming in to Japan again. The film is inspired from a book that suggested Japanese troops resorted to cannibalism while in prison camps. Protesters say that never happened and they are furious they want the movie never shown in Japan. It's official now. The strain of flu that is going around the country is as the epidemic threshold. That's not from us, it's from the Centers for Disease Control, which has identified 36 states where the flu is now considered widespread. Those most in danger are those people who are age 65 and older. But this particular flu virus has already caused the deaths of 15 children. Scientists are working on the best way to map and forecast the flu's movement, much like predicting the weather, watch this from CNN's doctor, Sanjay Gupta.
[Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Cnn Chief Medical Correspondent:] It's amazing how much more we know about how to predict flu. What they're trying to do now is predict the flu very much in the way that you predict the weather.
[Unidentified Female:] Hurricane season. Noah is predicting a below average season.
[Unidentified Male:] Many parts of the state were under a hurricane warning early Thursday.
[Gupta:] I know, all kidding aside, we don't always get the weather right, but this is pretty interesting. They use mathematical modeling to sort of predict where flu virus is going to be most dominant. But then they look at real time data and the real time data time is fascinating, people searching for flu on Google for example and they assimilate all that information to give you what are called hot spots, but they can go even deeper than that. This is a particular project that comes out of a Columbia school. You can actually figure out which week is going to be the worst in your particular city. New York City, January 10th. That's going to be your week. Look, if you're a parent, it may be more likely to keep your kids home from school if they seem sick at all. I mean, you're more likely to cancel play dates, but also for hospitals. They could be anticipated more patients coming in, so leading more search capacity, more beds available, having more medications, flu vaccine, things like that on standby. But this is sort of where we're headed with regard to predicting when things are going to get really bad.
[Tapper:] I want to get right to Dr. Kathryn Edwards. She runs the vaccine research program at Vanderbilt at Nashville, Tennessee. Dr. Edwards, thanks for joining us. We just watched how scientists such as yourself will soon be able to predict and track the flu, much like the weather. How will that help you fight the virus and keep infections down?
[Kathryn Edwards, Vaccine Trial Specialist:] Well certainly, we've been trying to predict influenza for centuries and it's a very, very hearty and confusing virus at times, but we do certainly the CDC has a lot of ways that they track the virus, we find out first of all where it is but then we also find out what kind of virus it is. And the CDC told us last week that a particular strain that's circulating is called H3N2 which we know causes more severe disease than the other strains. We also know that about half or maybe slight more than half of the strains don't match the current vaccine. So we know that then that everybody should still get vaccinated because even if it's not a perfect match, it's very effective. But we also know that influenza always throws a few punches that we may not have anticipated. And so we need to watch very carefully and listen to the things that CDC is telling us about how to deal with the strains. And so we know a lot more than we used to but we don't know at all at this point.
[Tapper:] You've been involved in clinical vaccine trials on many different flu strains for more than three decades, can all of the flu strains and this flu be compared. Do you approach them with the same strategy?
[Edwards:] I think that we approach them slightly differently. The usual strains when the virus changes a little bit causes new strains to be made and new vaccines to be made every year, and so those are generally kind of routine. We know how to change them, we don't have to do a lot of studies to make sure how they work. But when a flu strain changes dramatically like during the pandemic that we saw in 2009. Then we do need to look at those vaccines in a different way. We need to study them in a lot more people before we give them to people in the routine clinics. So they are a bit different. We've also been studying bird flu strains and we've also studied the LAIV vaccine that's given in the nose as opposed to the flu shot that's given in the arm. We know at least in children for instance that this particular year, the CDC recommended that children, preferentially health children get the nose drop and we know that actually the nose drop vaccine often is a little better if the strain isn't perfectly matched. So this may be a really good time for the children to be protected with the nose drop vaccine because the strain isn't exactly what's in the vaccine. We also know that we have some drugs, some antiviral medicines which can be helpful as well in taking care of the flu. Kind of like antibiotics, these are called antivirals. So early on in the illness, it's often very good to talk with the doctor, particularly for children, young children, certainly children at high risk with heart disease, that these antiviral agents may be just the ticket.
[Tapper:] All right, Dr. Kathryn Edwards, thank you so much. Wishing you a happy and healthy new year. As the remaining hours of 2014 tick away, what were the year's biggest scandals and controversies. We will count down the top 10 coming up.