New swine flu cases continued to be reported today, but the pace seems to have slowed slightly from previous days.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that it has received reports of 109 confirmed cases of the disease -- which health authorities are now taking pains to call H1N1 flu, reflecting the fact that it is transmitted easily in humans and has never been found in pigs.
The new tally includes 10 new cases in South Carolina, 50 cases in New York, 14 in California and one or two cases in each of eight other states.
That total does not include newly reported cases in Minnesota, Colorado and Georgia and an infected Marine at the Twentynine Palms base, bringing the U.S. total to 114.
"There are many more states with suspected cases," said Dr. Richard E. Besser, the CDC's acting director. At least 28 suspected cases have been identified in California, including four in Riverside, two in Los Angeles County and two in Ventura County.
The most recent onset of an identified case was April 26, Besser said. The majority of the cases appear to have occurred after April 18.
There has still been only one death in the U.S., a 22-month-old Mexican national who died in a Houston hospital Monday.
The World Health Organization said the number of confirmed H1N1 cases reported to it jumped overnight from 148 to 236. Dr. Keiji Fukuda, an assistant director-general, said the biggest part of that increase was from Mexico and resulted primarily from lab workers making their way through the backlog of stored specimens, not from new cases.
Fukuda said the number of confirmed cases in Mexico rose from 26 to 97 as technicians cleared away the backlog. To date, he added, only seven of the 176 influenza-related deaths in Mexico have been confirmed to be H1N1.
Besser said that the CDC will be releasing new information from Mexico later this afternoon.
WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan on Wednesday evening raised the world infectious disease alert level from Phase 4 to Phase 5, reflecting the fact that human-to-human transmission has been observed in at least two countries in one WHO region -- specifically in Mexico and the United States in the North American region.
"There is nothing today which suggests that we should be moving toward Phase 6," the highest alert level, Fukuda said at a Geneva news conference.
Besser said there has been a great deal of interest about H1N1 among the public and that CDC had added 50 people to answer telephones at the agency's hotline, 1-800-CDC-INFO. He said the agency has been receiving 4,000 calls per day and that the hold time on calls has been reduced from 15 minutes a few days ago to 90 seconds now.
He said the agency has also been receiving 2,000 e-mails per days and 6 million to 8 million hits per day on its website.
thomas.maugh@latimes.com
