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Georgia and South Carolina have their first confirmed cases of swine flu, joining 10 other states that have nearly 100 lab-confirmed cases. And health officials expect more to surface from the probable and suspect cases still being tested.
Georgia’s confirmed case is an unidentified 30-year-old Kentucky woman who went to Cancun, Mexico, on April 17 and came down with fever, chills and aches the following day, said S. Elizabeth Ford, director of the Georgia Division of Public Health. After returning home, the woman drove to Atlanta with her 5-year-old daughter on Thursday and shopped there. She went to LaGrange on Saturday and went to a wedding there on Sunday. She went to the ER after the wedding and at West Georgia Health System received a rapid test for flu, which came back positive. She is in stable condition in isolation in the intensive care unit at the hospital, said President/CEO Jerry Fulks.
“She is beginning to show some modest signs of improvement (but) she is still a very seriously ill” patient, he said. None of the woman’s family or close contacts has shown any symptoms but they were started on antiviral medications as a precaution, said Dr. Susan Lance, director of the Office of Protection and Safety for Georgia Public Health.
“We would expect if she had transmitted the illness to anybody, she would have transmitted it to those who she was closest to and she did not,” she said.
So far, the state has received 48 samples for further testing, with one positive, 23 negatives, and 24 pending, Dr. Ford said.
South Carolina has had 13 cases confirmed as swine flu, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control reported Thursday. Those cases all relate to students at a Newberry school who took a class trip to Mexico or their family members. Those patients are being asked to voluntarily isolate themselves at home. The state has tested 22 samples so far.
The latest official count from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of 109 confirmed cases in 11 states includes South Carolina but not the Georgia case, and the numbers have been changing daily. Acting CDC Director Richard Besser said the agency may soon stop reporting actual case numbers and start focusing on areas affected. So far, there has been one death, of a toddler from Mexico in Houston, and six hospitalizations but Dr. Besser said he expects to see more severe disease as the outbreak progresses.
“Unfortunately, I do expect there will be more deaths,” he said.
The CDC is gearing up for a potential vaccine by growing stocks of the virus that could be used to create it. While discussions are ongoing, the plan appears to be to let the manufacturers finish production of the season flu vaccine and then begin production of a swine flu shot that would be available in the fall, Dr. Besser said.
In the meantime, he called for a “shared responsibility” of government agencies, businesses and individuals to all take steps to thwart the spread of swine flu, such as practicing good hygiene.
“There no one action that will stop this,” Dr. Besser said. “There’s no one silver bullet.”
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If you come down with flu-like symptoms, the best first step is to contact your health care provider to see what kind of treatment or testing should be done, the Georgia Division of Public Health advised. A rapid test can determine if any influenza is present and public health has certain criteria for what should be tested further. Any test at the Georgia public health lab that comes back as an influenza A that does not match known subtypes is submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for confirmation that it is swine flu, influenza A H1N1. The CDC is in the process of sending out testing kits to state labs and Georgia may have the ability to do its own confirmation.
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