New York officials downplay threat of swine flu

Apr 29, 2009, 18:03 GMT

New York - New York state officials Wednesday downplayed the fact that New York has the highest total of confirmed cases of swine flu among ten US states, saying the situation was inexplicable - even as health workers were investigating 75 more probable cases and some schools remained closed.

New York Governor David Paterson and his health commissioner, Richard Daines, who said the state currently has no vaccine designed for swine flu, said they did not consider the swine flu outbreak any more important than unseasonal flu in springtime.

Asked why there was such an intense focus on swine flu when tens of thousands of New Yorkers are suffering the flu each spring, Paterson said the novelty if the new virus strain, which combines human, swine and bird flu genes, put the spotlight on the tiny group of New Yorkers.

The Centres for Disease Control Wednesday said New York had 51 of the country's 91 confirmed cases. Most of them were located in New York City and at a single high school, Saint Francis Preparatory School in Queens, where students who became ill had travelled to Mexico last month for spring recess.

Daines said the state was investigating 75 probable additional cases.

Paterson and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have repeatedly sought this week to reassure New Yorkers that all its wine flu cases were mild and everyone was recovering from it after the first medical treatment.

Paterson and Daines did not mention the confirmed death from swine flu in Texas of a young Mexican toddler, and their message was much different from the alarms being sounded by national health figures that the outbreak was just beginning in the US and deaths were expected.

Mexico has recorded 159 deaths since its first death on April 13, and has 1,311 people in hospital under treatment. Only 49 of the fatal and non-fatal cases have been confirmed as swine flu.

'The irony of this is that the flu does not seem to affect Americans the same way it affects Mexicans,' Paterson said during a daily progress report on the swine flu situation in New York.

'The novelty is there seems to be a mixture of swine, bird and human influenza elements and therefore it could be a hybrid or a strain of influenza for which we are not familiar with,' he said. 'When it happens, we now have difficulty to find antibodies to a disease.'

'This is a fear that there is nothing to substantiate with,' Paterson said. 'This is a fear that this is an illness for which there is no treatment, there is no data to accommodate it. For public safety we have to take the worst case scenario.'

Daines said New York state was preparing the next batch of millions of vaccine for the flu season that should be ready at year's end. He said the local government would prioritize preparations of an anti-swine flu vaccine once more medical data are available.

'We would prioritize if necessary, but we still have to learn a lot (about swine flu) before that,' Daines said.

Local news reports said Saint Francis school in Queens and the nearby Public School 177 were closed on Wednesday while tests were being conducted on students who showed severe flu symptoms.