U.S. health officials are seeing a surprisingly high number of cases of ordinary, seasonal flu at a time when the flu season typically peters out.
About half of people recently testing positive for the flu have the new swine-flu virus, Dr. Daniel Jernigan of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta said Friday.
The rest have seasonal flu, which is causing widespread or regional illness in about two dozen states, “something that we would not expect at this time,” he said. “We would be expecting the season to be slowing down or almost completely stopped.”
The higher numbers of seasonal-flu cases do not seem to be just because health officials are looking harder this year amid worries about swine flu, Jernigan said.
A network of doctors who track how many patients are coming in with flulike symptoms, plus evidence from school outbreaks and lab testing, points to more flu — not just more reporting, he said.
In the United States, there are more than 4,700 probable and confirmed cases of swine flu, and 173 hospitalizations and four deaths, Jernigan said. The tally doesn’t include a fifth death that Texas officials said Friday was due to swine flu.
“The H1N1 virus is not going away,” Jernigan said. The virus “appears to be expanding throughout the United States” and poses “an ongoing public health threat.”
Swine flu continues to affect more younger people — those ages 5 to 24 — and the CDC is still seeing relatively few cases in older people.
Officials are still monitoring the situation in Mexico, where the outbreak began. However, the CDC’s quarantine chief, Dr. Martin Cetron, said the agency was downgrading its warnings about travel to Mexico.
Latest developments
• Texas health officials said a 33-year-old Corpus Christi man died of swine flu this month, raising the number of U.S. deaths to five. A Corpus Christi-Nueces County health official said the man had pre-existing medical conditions, including heart problems.
• In New York City, three public schools in the borough of Queens were closed after hundreds of children were sent home sick this week, and a city official said Friday that three more schools would be shut down after students developed flu symptoms.
