24 Apr 2009

Swine Flu, Mexico Lung Illness Heighten Pandemic Risk

Disease trackers are asking U.S. hospitals to help follow a new strain of swine flu and are trying to determine whether it’s related to hundreds of illnesses and 57 deaths in Mexico.

A previously unseen variant of H1N1 swine influenza has sickened at least seven people in California and Texas, the Atlanta-based U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday. The World Health Organization said 57 people died among more than 800 in the Mexico City region who developed flu-like symptoms in the past month.

mexico fluGlobal health experts are studying whether the U.S. and Mexico illnesses pose a threat of pandemic, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. U.S. hospitals today were asked to collect samples from patients with flu-like symptoms, said William Schaffner, a flu expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.

“This has a sense of urgency about it,” Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt, said in a telephone interview today. “They are asking us who work in hospitals to go to our emergency rooms and our pediatric wards to gather specimens and start testing them.”

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Flu can spread quickly when a new strain emerges, because no one has natural immunity. The so-called 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which may have killed as many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people, experts said.

Bloomberg.comL.A. Times

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