State public health officials Wednesday were tracking nine suspected cases of swine flu in Illinois as the World Health Organization raised its alert status to Level 5, a step from declaring a global pandemic.
The Illinois Department of Public Health said people likely infected with the new flu virus included five in Chicago, one in DuPage County, two in Kane County and one in Lake County, ranging in age from 6 to 36.
The University of Chicago Medical Center announced that two of the nine were employees there.
Among the probable cases of swine flu that were reported Wednesday by the state health department were:
– A 12-year-old girl in Rogers Park, a student at Kilmer Elementary School.
– A 20-year-old man in Rogers Park, a student at Loyola University Chicago.
– A 25-year-old man in Lakeview.
– A 36-year-old woman in Woodlawn.
– A 35-year-old woman in Hegewisch.
On Saturday, Michael Hairsine, 20, a political science major at Loyola, said he thought he had allergies. On Sunday, he woke up with body aches. By Sunday night, his fever was so high his dorm roommates were icing him down.
On Monday, he visited the campus clinic and was packed off to an emergency room, then to quarantine, and then back to his parents’ home near St. Louis.
“I could hardly move,” Hairsine said by phone. “It was a chore to get out of bed. I felt absolutely terrible. I feel like it still is the flu, but it’s not so terrible that people should be freaking out the way they are.”
Even so, there is cause for concern. Doctors and pharmacists are worried about running low on the antiviral medicine Tamiflu.
Hand sanitizers were set up Wednesday at city airports and at a Chicago Fire soccer game at Toyota Park in Bridgeview.
Early Wednesday, the first U.S. fatality from the swine flu was announced: a 23-month-old Mexican boy who had traveled with his family to Texas.
The flu outbreak is suspected of killing 159 people in Mexico and has sickened thousands. Five new states announced Wednesday that they had confirmed cases of swine flu, bringing to 11 the total number of states with cases confirmed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The rapid spread of the virus has prompted three school closings in the Chicago area, including Kilmer Elementary School in Rogers Park. At a nearby church, St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church, Rev. Joe Jackson said the communion will be altered during weekend worship.
As the outbreak spread, the WHO took the unprecedented step of raising the infectious disease alert level to 5. At this level of alert, the likelihood of a pandemic “is very high or inevitable,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director-general. The highest level, 6, would indicate that a pandemic was under way.
Outside Kilmer, the first Chicago-area school closed, parent Antonia Garcia said she can’t seem to get away from the specter of swine flu.
First her sister in Mexico called to say a clinic was testing her for the virus, and then the school attended by her 4-year-old preschooler Justin was shut down.
“When they called me, I felt chills in my body,” she said. “I’m worried for my children.”
