WEDNESDAY, April 22, 2009 (Health.com) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is investigating two cases of swine flu detected in children in the San Diego area last week.
Swine flu is caused by a virus similar to the regular flu virus that circulates in people every year, but is a strain that is typically found only in pigs or in people who have direct contact with pigs.
The children were infected with a virus known as swine influenza A H1N1, which has a unique combination of genes not previously seen in flu viruses in either humans or swine—although it shares similarities with a virus that has been circulating in pigs since 1999.
Typically one person in the United States is infected with swine flu every one to two years, although there have been 12 cases in the three-year period between December 2005 and January 2009. Most of the time, people who get sick from swine flu have been in contact with pigs, and the virus doesn’t spread from person to person.
Since neither of the two children, a 10-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl, had contact with pigs, it “increases the possibility that human-to-human transmission of this new influenza virus has occurred,” according to a CDC report. The girl did attend an agricultural fair four weeks before becoming sick, she said, but did not have any contact with pigs or other livestock. Family members of both children also had flu-like symptoms, but it’s not clear if they were infected with the same virus since samples weren’t taken when they were ill.
Both children had a fever and cough in late March (and one child vomited). The children, who live in the adjacent San Diego and Imperial counties in Southern California but had no known contact with one another, have since recovered.
“We’ve only got the two cases to go on and both kids recovered on their own, so that’s certainly good news,” says Tom Skinner, a CDC spokesperson.
Next page: Boy traveled from California to Dallas
Comments (0)