County health officials on lookout for swine flu

Published 11:45 pm Friday, April 24, 2009

A new strain of swine flu believed to have killed 20 people in Mexico has doctors and public health agencies throughout the country on the alert for signs that the disease might be spreading.

Eight people in the United States have contracted the strain, a never-before-seen hybrid of swine flu, bird flu and human flu viruses.

Although no cases of the new flu have been reported yet in Washington, state, local health officials are asking physicians to be on the alert for patients who have influenzalike symptoms.

Patients should be tested if they have recently traveled to areas where swine flu has been reported — including California, Texas and Mexico — and have the classic flu symptoms, including high fever, sore throat, runny nose and body aches, said Donn Moyer, a spokesman for the state Department of Health.

If tests show the patient has the flu, scientists at the state health department’s lab in Shoreline will try to determine what type of flu it is.

If necessary, it will be sent to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for further testing, Moyer said.

The eight patients in the United States who had the new flu strain have recovered, with six cases in California and two in Texas.

New York City health officials say about 75 students at a Queens high school have fallen ill with flulike symptoms and testing is under way to rule out the new strain of swine flu.

In Mexico, Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordoba said 68 people have died of flu, though the strain has not been determined.

“We are very, very concerned,” World Health Organization spokesman Thomas Abraham said Friday. “We have what appears to be a novel virus and it has spread from human to human … It’s ‘All hands on deck’ at the moment.”

The new strain of swine flu has no distinct symptoms from seasonal influenza, so patients have to be tested so see what type they have.

Scientists have long been concerned that a new flu virus could launch a worldwide pandemic of a killer disease. A new virus could evolve when different flu viruses infect a pig, a person or a bird, mingling their genetic material. The resulting hybrid could spread quickly because people would have no natural defenses against it.

Flu periodically transforms from a typical winter bug into a killer virus.

The most deadly of these outbreaks occurred in 1918 and 1919, when an estimated 50 million people died worldwide.

However, Dr. Yuan-Po Tu, who tracks influenza issues at The Everett Clinic, said it’s too early to tell if this is the start of a widespread flu outbreak.

“I think we’ll have a much better handle on it within five to seven days… with more genetic information to base some scientific understanding on,” Tu said.

Common strains of swine flu circulate among pigs all the time, he said. “They get flu just like humans.”

“What is making this different is apparently this swine flu is now crossed over into humans,” Tu said. “There is some concern that it’s being passed from human to human, which makes it a higher potential for being the next pandemic strain.”

The Everett Clinic is part of a nationwide monitoring system that helps state and federal officials track the spread of flu each year. About 2,000 of its patients are tested annually to determine which of two basic types of influenza a patient has.

“Sometimes you can’t figure that out,” Tu said, and it’s sent to state or federal health authorities for more testing.

The swine flu cases come at a time when seasonal flu is declining, both in Washington and nationally.

“What we don’t know is if this influenza behaves like most influenza viruses do, that it tends to be a wintertime virus,” Tu said.

Antiviral drugs, available by prescription, do seem to be effective in combating the new strain of swine flu, Moyer said.

The public shouldn’t panic, he said. Instead, people should take the same steps recommended for anyone who suspects they have a flulike illness: stay home from work or school, cover your cough and wash your hands frequently.

“People should be confident that we have better systems to monitor for this than anytime in the history of the world,” Moyer said.

The Washington Post and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Reporter Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.