First death of US resident from H1N1 flu
Posted: 06 May 2009 0526 hrs

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WASHINGTON: A woman from Texas is the first US resident to die from Influenza A (H1N1) flu, health officials said on Tuesday after a Mexican boy died last month in the United States due to the virus.

The Texas Department of State Health Services said on its website that "a woman from Cameron County who had chronic underlying health conditions died earlier this week" after contracting the (A)H1N1 virus.

No more details were available about the woman, whose death from the new strain of influenza was announced as US health officials confirmed a spike in the number of confirmed infections, but played down the uptick as likely due to more widespread testing.

"There are over 403 confirmed cases," up from 286 reported Monday in the United States, Richard Besser, acting head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told a daily news briefing.

The spike "doesn't reflect transmission as much as that we're catching up with the testing," Besser added.

"As we get these test kits out to state labs and as they get up to speed, some of the backlog that they've had on testing will go away and we'll see a big bump in the number of cases," he said.

So far, only 35 people have been hospitalised in the United States because of the new strain of H1N1.

"What we're seeing is rates of hospitalisation that are similar to what we see with seasonal flu," said Besser.

But given that seasonal flu sends some 200,000 people to hospital and kills some 36,000 people in the United States each year, he said that health officials "expect to see additional hospitalisations and it's likely we would see additional deaths" from the (A)H1N1 virus.

US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also warned that there would likely be more cases, more hospitalisations and more deaths in the United States, even though the virus was not as severe as it had been when the new strain of influenza was first detected in Mexico last month.

Twenty-six deaths in Mexico have been blamed on the virus. - AFP/de