City Flu Tests Find New Type of Victim

Health officials have confirmed the city's first case of swine flu involving a patient who hadn't been to Mexico lately and isn't linked to a school that was the site of the biggest U.S. outbreak.
    
As many as 1,000 New Yorkers are believed likely to have contracted swine flu in the past few weeks, the city's health department said, but until this weekend almost all of those victims were connected to the St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens.
    
The rest of the city's cases involved people who had recently returned from Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak.
    
The emergence of a patient not connected to those two groups is notable but no cause for alarm, said the city's health commissioner, Thomas Frieden.
    
"Although H1N1 is likely spreading in the community, it does not appear to have caused more severe illness than seasonal flu so far,'' he said, using the scientific name for the virus.
    
As of Saturday the city said it had confirmed 62 cases of the virus in the city, up from its previous tally of 49. Another 17 cases are considered probable for the illness, including two more people who also had no link to a previously known cluster.
    
State health officials said Saturday that they had found three more probable cases of swine flu scattered elsewhere in the state, bringing the total of probable or confirmed cases of the illness outside New York City to 16. None of those people is seriously ill.
    
A Long Island school system announced Saturday it was closing until May 10 because three students had probable swine flu cases; one was identified earlier in the week. The students have mild symptoms and are recovering without hospitalization, Deer Park school district superintendent Elizabeth Marino said in a statement posted on the district's Web site.
    
State Health Commissioner Richard Daines said many people being tested are turning out not to have the sickness. Of the 43 specimens tested Friday by the state health lab, many turned out to be common types of flu.
    
Frieden noted that while hunting for swine flu, city authorities had found several people who were seriously ill with more common types of influenza. The flu kills 2,000 people a year in New York City.