Swine Flu News Updates
April 24, 2009 by national
Filed under Stories of Interest
Swine flu news updates will be posted here continually. Our original post on the swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the US can be read here. Swine Flu – Outbreak in Mexico, U.S. Tied To New Unique Strain
Updates & Additional Swine Flu News Story Links
Friday May 1st, 2009
Thursday April 30th 2009
Wednesday April 29th 2009
Tuesday April 28th 2009
Monday April 27th 2009
- The WHO has raised the pandemic alert level to 4, the highest since the scale was developed in 2005.
Sunday April 26th 2009
Saturday April 25th 2009
Friday April 24th 2009
US medical authorities expressed strong concern Friday about an unprecedented multi-strain swine flu outbreak that has killed at least 60 people in Mexico and infected seven people in the United States.
“It’s very obvious that we are very concerned. We’ve stood up emergency operation centers,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesman Dave Daigle told AFP.
One major source of concern was that the virus included strains from different types of flu.
“This is the first time that we’ve seen an avian strain, two swine strains and a human strain,” said Daigle, adding that the virus had influenza strains from European and Asian swine, but not from North American swine.
In 11 of 12 reported human cases of swine influenza (H1N1) virus infection in the United States from December 2005 to February 2009, the CDC has documented direct or indirect contact with swine.
But the seven known cases of the previously undetected strain in the United States — five from California and two from Texas — did not have contact with pigs. The seven people infected have all recovered from the flu.
“We have determined that this virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human,” the CDC said on its website. “However, at this time, we have not determined how easily the virus spreads between people.”
Local and state health officials were interviewing not just the people who were infected but the people with whom they had contact, Daigle noted.
CDC says too late to contain U.S. flu outbreak
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.
CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing it was likely too late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people.
“There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely,” he said.
He said the U.S. cases and Mexican cases are likely the same virus. “So far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same.” But Besser said it was unclear why the virus was causing so many deaths in deaths in Mexico and such mild disease in the United States.
3rd Possible Swine Flu Outbreak In Mexico
Mexico has reported a third possible outbreak of swine flu in Mexicali, near the U.S. border, with four suspect cases and no deaths to date, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday.
Source
WHO calls emergency meeting on swine flu
The World Health Organization said on Friday that it was convening an emergency committee to advise whether outbreaks of swine flu in the United States and Mexico constituted an international public health threat.
“WHO will convene, sometime in the very near future, an emergency committee under the International Health Regulations, which will consider whether or not this event constitutes a public health event of international concern,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told Reuters in Geneva.
