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To the Editor: The Naval Health Research Center serves as the Navy hub for the Department of Defense's Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (GEIS), in which it monitors influenza-like illness among recruit trainees of all military services, military dependents, and crew members of large Navy ships (population, >1000). The center works in collaboration with the Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Project of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which monitors populations located on the border between California and Mexico. The first two human cases of novel swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV), known as swine flu, in...

An unlicensed intravenous form of the antiviral drug Relenza saved the life of a woman with a severe illness resulting from infection by the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus, British doctors reported today in the journal Lancet. Dr. Michael Kidd and Dr. Mervyn Singer of the University College London Hospitals were treating the virus, commonly known as swine flu, in a 22-year-old woman who had contracted it after undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease. The woman had increasing shortness of breath, build-up of fluid in both lungs and was progressively deteriorating. Physicians had given her Tamiflu and Relenza, which is normally given...

Students will get free vaccinations. Health clinics will turn into “flu centers” to relieve hospitals. Emergency room statistics will be reported on the Web every day. And schools will close only as a last resort. Girding for a second wave of the swine flu pandemic that has already killed more than 50 people in New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined a strategy on Tuesday that was equal parts infection control and panic control. “It’s natural to imagine a worst-case scenario, but all signs at this point in time do point to an outbreak that will be much more...

TORONTO -- The lungs of people who have died from swine flu look more like those of the victims of H5N1 avian influenza than those of people who succumb to regular flu, the chief of infectious diseases pathology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says. Study of about 70 fatal H1N1 cases so far also reveals there may be more incidences of co-infections with bacteria than was earlier thought, Dr. Sherif Zaki told The Canadian Press in an interview. The damage to lung tissue is consistent with that inflicted by ARDS or acute respiratory distress symptom, Zaki says, referring...

<p>SWINE flu spreads four times faster than other viruses and 40 per cent of the fatalities are young adults in good health, the world's top health official says.</p> <p>"This virus travels at an unbelievable, almost unheard of speed," World Health Organisation Director General Margaret Chan told France's Le Monde daily in an interview.</p>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Doctors are reporting a severe form of swine flu that goes straight to the lungs, causing severe illness in otherwise healthy young people and requiring expensive hospital treatment, the World Health Organisation said on Friday.