Seven people in U.S. hit by strange new swine flu

Seven people in U.S. hit by strange new swine flu
Fri Apr 24, 2009 1:19pm EDT Email | Print | Share| Reprints | Single Page[-] Text [+]
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FACTBOX: New flu strain is a genetic mix
5:33am EDTBy Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Seven people have been diagnosed with a new kind of swine flu in California and Texas, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Thursday.

All seven people have recovered but the virus itself is a never-before-seen mixture of viruses typical among pigs, birds and humans, the CDC said.

"We are likely to find more cases," the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat told a telephone briefing. "We don't think this is time for major concern around the country."

Only one of the seven cases was sick enough to be hospitalized and all have recovered, Schuchat said.

CDC officials are unsure whether the cases are related to an unusually late and severe flu season in Mexico in which 20 people have died.

"Generally the period of infection ends during the last week of February and the first week of March, but this year there was an atypical situation where the transmission period was prolonged until April," Mexico's Ministry of Health said in a statement.

Canadian officials have asked doctors to keep an eye out for cases of respiratory illness among travelers from Mexico.

"Symptoms from those seriously ill in Mexico include high fever, headache, eye pain, shortness of breath and extreme fatigue with rapid progression of symptoms to severe respiratory distress in about five days," the British Columbia Center for Disease Control said in a statement.

In the United States, the CDC reported the new strain of swine flu on Tuesday in a boy and a girl from California's two southernmost counties.

Now, five more cases have been found via normal surveillance for seasonal influenza. None of the patients, whose symptoms closely resembled seasonal flu, had any direct contact with pigs.

Two of the new cases were among 16-year-olds at the same school in San Antonio "and there's a father-daughter pair in California," Schuchat said. The boy whose case was reported on Tuesday had flown to Dallas, but the CDC has found no links to the other Texas cases.

The agency will issue daily updates here

HUMAN TO HUMAN

"We believe at this point that human-to-human spread is occurring," Schuchat said. "That's unusual. We don't know yet how widely it is spreading ... We are also working with international partners to understand what is occurring in other parts of the world."

The CDC's Dr. Nancy Cox said virus samples from the seven appear to carry genes from swine flu, avian flu and human flu viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.