The nation’s top public health officials, including Kathleen Sebelius, the new secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, held a press conference this morning to describe the official response to the new swine flu outbreak.
Officials said there are now 91 confirmed cases in the U.S. and the nation’s first confirmed death: a 23-month-old child in Texas who had been hospitalized.
“We expect to see more cases, more hospitalizations and — unfortunately — we’re likely to see more deaths,” said Sebelius in her first press conference as secretary following her confirmation Tuesday by the U.S. Senate.
Sebelius was joined by top officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. All those agencies are playing some role in dealing with the outbreak.
CDC Acting Director Dr. Richard Besser said authorities were taking an “aggressive, forward leaning” stance because influenza is unpredictable and no one yet knows if this latest outbreak, a strain never before seen in humans, will “fizzle out” or “become more virulent.”
Besser said all states will have received some share of the national stockpile of antiviral drugs to deal with the flu by May 3. Meanwhile, he said, no state is experiencing any shortage of resources for dealing with the outbreak, which remains small-scale so far compared to typical flu outbreaks.
“At this point, no state is anywhere near having problems dealing with this,” Besser said.
Officials said annual or seasonal flu kills 36,000 people a year on average in the U.S. It remains to be seen how deadly the new strain will be.
Kansas still has only two confirmed cases, officials said, but there are now 10 states with confirmed cases.
Besser said the most recent onset among the confirmed U.S. cases was April 24. He advised against travel to Mexico, where the outbreak has been most serious.
Officials said there are two antiviral drugs that have been shown effective against the new flu strain in laboratory tests but that their efficacy in treating patients was still being assessed. Development of a vaccine for the flu is being expedited and one could be ready for distribution by fall, if it is still considered necessary then.
FDA officials said they have several teams working on different aspects of the outbreak including those considering ramifications for the nation’s blood supply and consumer protection, in case “dangerous” treatments are marketed to people worried about the illness.
A video recording of the press conference can be viewed at www.hhs.gov.