Four new swine flu cases in WC

Four new swine flu cases have been reported in the Western Cape, the provincial health department said on Wednesday.

Departmental spokeswoman Faiza Steyn said these four cases, which the department was notified about on Tuesday night, brought the provincial tally to 12.

One teenager infected
"All are travel cases and they come from countries that have high infection rates." Steyn said the people were in isolation at home as the cases were mild.

Three were adults and one was a teenager. The teenager had taken part in a squash tournament earlier this month in Johannesburg where 11 university students contracted the virus.

Gauteng has most cases
Another person had recently come back from travelling in Thailand and Singapore, while the other two cases had returned from China and Mauritius respectively.

According to statistics posted on Tuesday night on the National Institute for Communicable Diseases' website, 93 cases of the AH1N1 influenza had been reported in the country. The bulk of these - 51 cases - were in Gauteng, with the Eastern Cape and Western Cape each reporting 12 cases. Limpopo remained free of swine flu, according to the latest figures.

NICD deputy director Dr Lucille Blumberg said once South Africa had reported 100 cases, it would follow the directive of the World Health Organisation and begin to focus on serious cases in people who already had underlying health issues.

She said the figure of 100 cases was just an "arbitrary number" designed to ensure that resources were best managed since most cases of the flu were not serious.

Mild so far
"It spreads very quickly [but] most of it is mild and resources need to be tailored to manage the important part of the country." She said once the virus was known to be in the country and some idea of its transmission was ascertained, "there's no point in following up every mild case". Instead the focus would shift to looking at the virus itself and the "specific route for how it would play out".

Commenting on media reports of apparent public panic in Britain following a case where an otherwise healthy six-year old girl died after contracting swine flu, Blumberg said these kind of instances were "rare".

Death rate approaching 450
The overwhelming number of cases in pandemics like this were mild. "A feature is that you may have severe illness in otherwise healthy people... These are rare events but are a feature of new strains."

She said the around 96,000 cases reported world-wide was a "minuscule" proportion of the actual figures of people with the illness. Many people did not seek medical help because it was so mild.

In this context, the actual number of deaths was a "small proportion", said Blumberg. Latest figures suggested there had been at least 429 deaths world-wide. –(Sapa, July 2009).

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