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Source: ONE News -
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Seven people have been diagnosed with a new kind of swine flu in
California and Texas, the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention reported.
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 Centre 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.
"We haven't seen this strain before, but we hadn't been looking as
intensively as we have," Schuchat said. "It's very possible that
this is something new that hasn't been happening before."
Surveillance for and scrutiny of influenza has been stepped up
since 2003, when H5N1 bird flu reappeared in Asia. Experts fear
this strain, or another strain, could spark a pandemic that could
kill millions.
The influenza A strain is an H1N1, the same subtype as one of the
seasonal flu viruses now circulating.
Now that the normal influenza season is waning, it may be easier
to spot cases of the new swine flu, Schuchat said.
The CDC is asking doctors to think about the possibility of swine
flu when patients appear with flu-like symptoms, to take a sample
and send it to state health officials or the CDC for testing.
Cox said the CDC is already preparing a vaccine against the new
strain, just in case.
"This is standard operating procedure," he said.
