Officials have confirmed that a woman in Texas’s southernmost county, Cameron County, has died of swine flu:
Health authorities today reported a second death in the United States from swine flu — a woman in south Texas — even as the federal government rescinded its recommendation that schools shut down if they have any suspected cases of the virus.
The Texas Department of State Health Services announced this afternoon that a woman from Cameron County, the southernmost county in the state, died earlier this week after contracting swine flu. It said she had “chronic underlying health conditions” but did not elaborate or provide any other details on the woman.
The Brownsville Herald provides a few significant details:
Health officials say the victim had been pregnant. She gave birth and they say the newborn is doing fine.
Cameron County Judge Carlos H. Cascos said although residents should remain cautious, they should not be alarmed. Cascos said the woman, along with the toddler from Mexico, who also died from swine flu last month, both had underlying health conditions.
Media reports reveal the woman had been battling the flu for about two weeks.
The toddler had a chronic respiratory condition diagnosed at birth. During the couple of weeks before he died, he developed a high fever and later pneumonia. He died at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.
I haven’t been able to determine from published sources whether the woman had recently visited Mexico.
Sad as they are neither of these cases represents what we should be worrying about for a pandemic. What we should be worrying about are deaths of otherwise healthy young adults who definitely contracted the disease via human-to-human transmission.
Absent a sharply increasing death rate among this group in the United States I think we should be revisiting the deaths in Mexico for some underlying health problem in those who died of swine flu there.
i’d like to know whether this woman who died is of mexican descent.
before her, only mexicans have died from this disease, despite it having popped up in multiple countries not long at all after it came about in mexico.
and, last i checked, the only swine to have “swine flu” is in canada, when the outbreak seems to have sprung up in mexico.
this just doesn’t feel right …
I will probably add another update later tonight, but the post I wrote about this swine one week ago, remains valid now. I am guessing there are at least several hundred cases in NYC and there haven’t been any reports of people developing severe respiratory problems. The Mexican cases have been revisited and for that reason, the number of deaths attributed to the swine flu has been reduced. Why are you so worried about this flu as opposed to seasonal flu?
vinny, if you’d read what I’ve been writing about this subject for the last week or so, you’d know that I’m not worried about it more than seasonal flu but, rather, have been pointing out that for reasons that are beyond me, many of which I believe are not only unscientific but patently absurd, a lot of nominally sensible people are.