It's currently flu season in the Southern Hemisphere, and viral spread in Argentina has prompted schools there to give students an early vacation. But swine flu hasn't abated in the Northern Hemisphere, unusual since influenza usually retreats from summer's high heat and humidity. Confirmed U.S. cases have reached nearly 34,000 — a fraction of the infected are tested — and deaths rose 34 percent in the past week to hit 170, the CDC said Thursday. England's health minister said Thursday that his country faces a projected 100,000 new swine flu cases a day by the end of August.
Also Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the U.S. will provide 420,000 treatment courses of the anti-viral medicine Tamiflu to the Pan-American Health Organization to help fight the flu in Latin America and the Caribbean. "All of us have a responsibility to help support one another in the face of this challenge," Sebelius said at a meeting of health ministers in Mexico.
Sasisekharan's paper, meanwhile, warned that the H1N1 strain might just need a single change or mutation to make it resistant to Tamiflu.
The researchers also noted that the new virus is more active in the gastrointestinal tract than seasonal flu, leading to intestinal distress and vomiting in about 40 percent of those infected.
The research was funded by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences.
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