Above about H1N1 flu fight.
U.S. health officials are preparing intensively to combat an anticipated wave of outbreaks of the new H1N1 flu when children return to school and the pace of cases picks up.
Identified by scientists just three months ago, the new swine-flu virus has reached nearly every country, spreading tenaciously with what the World Health Organization this week called "unprecedented speed." Rather than die down in the summer as some experts initially expected, it is continuing to proliferate even in countries like the U.S. and U.K. that are in the full bloom of summer, when the march of influenza normally slows down. It is also spreading rapidly in the Southern Hemisphere.
Anne Schuchat, chief of immunization and respiratory diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Friday that the agency expects an increase in cases before the normal start of the flu season in mid-autumn, because children are likely to spread it to one another once they go back to school. Infectious diseases normally spread readily among children, and this virus has hit children and young adults harder than the elderly, who normally suffer the heaviest toll from flu.
"We've seen it in camps and military units," Dr. Schuchat said. "I'm expecting when school reopens and kids are all back together, in some communities at least we may see an increase."
The number of confirmed U.S. infections is now 40,617, with 263 deaths, the CDC said Friday. But the agency believes that more than one million people have been infected and weren't tested for the virus or didn't visit a doctor. The disease has become so widespread that the agency will probably suspend tallying individual case counts within the next few weeks and focus instead on tracking clusters, severe cases, deaths and other unusual events -- a more traditional approach to tracking diseases, Dr. Schuchat said.
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