Officials warn of swine flu deaths in U.S.

Federal officials Tuesday warned of a “marathon” swine flu outbreak that will turn deadly, as hundreds of children from an infected New York City school fell ill and more hospitalizations were reported.

“As this moves forward, I fully expect that we will see deaths from this infection,” said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They are seeing many deaths in Mexico, and we are trying to learn more about that and why the situation in Mexico is different here.”

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano echoed the warning and called it “very likely that we will see more serious presentations of illness and some deaths as we go through this flu cycle.”

“In a normal seasonal influenza cycle, we would anticipate, across the United States, 35,000 deaths,” Ms. Napolitano said. “Of course, this is not a seasonal flu, but I think it would not be unexpected that there will be some more severe illness and some deaths as we proceed forward.”

AirTran Flight 85 from Cancun, Mexico, was held briefly after landing at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport because two male passengers experienced flulike symptoms during the flight.

The men did not have respiratory symptoms consistent with swine flu, so they and the 115 other passengers were released after state and federal health authorities were consulted.

The number of infections in the U.S. grew to 66 confirmed cases from 40 on Monday in New York, #Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, Texas and California, and at least five patients have been hospitalized. The growing threat prompted the Obama administration Tuesday to seek $1.5 billion to fight the outbreak.

Also Tuesday, Michael O. Leavitt, who served as health and human services secretary under President George W. Bush, told The Washington Times that the Obama administration had conducted several studies and tests on sealing off the Mexican border to ward off a pandemic.

The team, he said, concluded that such a move would be impractical, ineffective and economically ruinous.

“People jump to the conclusion, ‘Let’s shut the border down and maybe we can keep it out,’” Mr. Leavitt said. “It would require a substantial part of the military to logistically do it, and it would not just be airports, but buses and cars and people who walk across the borders, which are large and porous. And that just doesn’t work.

“It might seem like it would slow the virus down slightly, but we concluded it would not even do that,” Mr. Leavitt told The Times in an interview.

In New York City, Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said “many hundreds” of schoolchildren are sick with what officials suspect is the H1N1 virus, or swine flu. Officials in Los Angeles investigated the deaths of two men, but neither tested positive for the virus.

“This is going to be a marathon,” Ms. Napolitano said.

Mr. Leavitt agreed, saying a pandemic “has to be managed differently than any other disaster.”

“A pandemic will last 12 to 18 months and comes in two or three waves, so it has to be approached differently,” he said. “It’s like a wildfire: If you can catch it while it’s still smoking, you can contain it, but once it starts to spread, it’s difficult to suppress, so the strategy is to keep the people and property out of its way.”

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