WASHINGTON — U.S. health officials on Tuesday lifted a recommendation that schools close for as much as two weeks whenever a student catches the new flu, a move that reflects growing confidence that the outbreak may be milder than initially feared, despite the death of the first American from the illness.
Parents and teachers should instead watch children for any signs of the flu and keep them out of school for a week at any hint they are getting sick.
Also Tuesday, Texas officials announced the first death of a U.S. citizen from the disease. They said a 33-year-old schoolteacher from Harlingen, near the U.S.-Mexico border. She had not traveled to Mexico recently.
The Texas Department of State Health Services posted on its Web site that she had underlying health conditions and had recently given birth. The only previous U.S. death was of a 21-month-old Mexican toddler who died last week at a Houston hospital. He also was said to have other health problems.
The shift in the school policy will affect thousands of students around the country whose schools closed in the past week in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus. At least 726 schools nationwide that serve more than 480,000 students have closed.
Federal officials said they decided to reverse the previous recommendation because most cases in the United States so far have been relatively mild, a genetic analysis of the virus found no signs it was especially dangerous, and there was a recognition that closing schools could probably do little to prevent its spread.
“When you hear of the difficulties involved — of children dropped at libraries because there’s nowhere for home care, of people who could lose their job because they don’t have sick leave — these factors are really real, and we need to really feel that the public health benefit of that makes it warranted,” said Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A week ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that schools with at least one confirmed case of H1N1 close for as long as 14 days.
Also Tuesday, Navy spokesman Lt. Sean Robertson told the Associated Press that there are about 50 suspected cases of the virus from crew members on board the USS Dubuque, which is based in San Diego. Its deployment was canceled.
The number of confirmed cases continued to rise Tuesday, reaching 651 in the United States and about 1,883 worldwide.
Meanwhile, new clues emerged that supports the notion that the virus tends to produce relatively mild illness. A genetic analysis of the virus suggests it probably came into being sometime before mid-September.
If it then started spreading person-to-person, it may have been present throughout the winter in Mexico and may have become visible only at the end of the flu season. The deaths in Mexico would simply be the expected mortality in a huge epidemic of more-or-less normal influenza.
“If this virus has been circulating in Mexico for several months, we can only presume that it wasn’t killing everyone it infected,” said Oliver Pybus, of the University of Oxford, leader of one of four groups of biologists estimating the age of the virus. “It would be very surprising if this was a highly virulent virus that had been spreading since September but wasn’t detected until April.”
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