Confirmed swine flu cases in US cross 400 with 2 deaths

Source: http://nationmultimedia.com/worldhotnews/30102064/Confirmed-swine-flu-cases-in-US-cross-400-with-2-d

Washington - A woman in her 30s died of swine flu in Texas, state health officials confirmed Tuesday, taking the overall toll from the outbreak in the United States to two.

The woman lived in Cameron County, near the US-Mexico border, and also suffered from other chronic health problems, said Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of State Health Services.

The woman died last week, Williams told the German news agency dpa. Last week, a 23-month-old boy from Mexico City died in a Houston hospital.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Tuesday that the number of confirmed cases in the US increased to 403 in 38 states. New York reported 90 cases, Illinois 82, California 49, Delaware 20 and Texas 41.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who visited the Atlanta, Georgia-based CDC on her first official trip outside Washington, said there were "another 700 probable cases in 44 states."

"We know there will be more cases. The numbers will go up and unfortunately there are likely to be more hospitalizations and more deaths," she said.

Monday's US count was 286 cases in 36 states.

"But the good news is that the virus does not seem to be as severe as we once thought it could be, based on the very early studies in Mexico," Sebelius said.

The US government on Tuesday changed its advisory on school closures related to swine flu, saying that schools were no longer required to close down if students fell ill. Schools were earlier advised to close even if there were suspected flu cases.

"This is not an indication that we know enough about the course that this virus will take," Sebelius cautioned. "We don't know what will happen over the course of the summer and we certainly don't know what will happen when we get into flu season ... later this fall."

Richard Besser, acting director of the CDC, said the "big bump in cases" didn't reflect transmission, but rather that "we're catching up with the testing."

He said the confirmed cases were in patients in the age range of three months to 81 years, with a median age of 16 years. There were 35 hospitalizations in the US, where 62 per cent of those confirmed to have contracted the virus were under 18 years.

In Geneva, the World Health Organization updated the number of global laboratory-confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus to 1,490 human infections in 21 countries.