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NEWS ALERT The Fort Worth Independent School District has just announced it is closing all schools until May 8.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Dr. Damon T. Arnold, Illinois Department of Public Health Director, announced there are currently nine probable cases of swine flu in Illinois: five in Cook County (all within the Chicago city limits), one in DuPage County, two in Kane County and one in Lake County. A probable case means the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) has tested a specimen and found that it is positive for influenza A, but it could not be subtyped. The Department has shipped three of the nine probable cases to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to perform final...

The United States is likely to experience more cases of swine flu, the head of the Centers of Disease Control said today. And the disease is likely to become more dangerous. "We are seeing more cases of swine flu, and we expect to see more cases of swine flu," said Richard Besser, Director of the CDC, at a White House briefing. "I would expect that over time we are going to see more severe disease in this country." Basser said the CDC is aware of 20 confirmed cases of swine flu in five U.S. states: eight in New York, one...

WASHINGTON -- With President Obama golfing and without a Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration ramped up efforts to find and isolate U.S. cases of swine flu as it issued a public health emergency warning and moved millions of doses of drugs to treat the flu close to the areas of early outbreak. At a White House briefing occuring while Obama golfed with his Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Trade Representative Ron Kirk, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, announced the nation's top health department would soon announce a national "public health emergency." Napolitano...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. is declaring a public health emergency to deal with the emerging new swine flu.

Napolitano declares public health emergency @ 1:01 pm by Eric Zimmermann The United States will declare the swine flu outbreak a public health emergency, Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano said today. Speaking at a White House press briefing, Napolitano said the declaration is not as severe it sounds. "It allows us to free up state and local resources" that otherwise would not be available, Napolitano said. The declaration does not necessarily convey the authority to initiate quarantines. "We're nowhere near that kind of decision," Napolitano said. Also at the briefing, the Director of the Center for Disease Control, Richard Besser,...

Please keep chat and one-liners to a minimum. This thread is intended to be a one-stop-shop for all of todays NEWS and info related to the Mexican Swine Flu. To make it faster for everyone to catch up on the actual NEWS, PLEASE PLEASE minimize chat, jokes, bashing the administration, soapboxes, and so forth. These live threads can become useless monster threads if everyone throws in their one-liners, and we all have 'em! So let's try to keep this thread useful for the latest NEWS. Thank you all in advance.

group of Queens high school students likely brought Mexico's deadly swine flu epidemic to the city after they went on a wild spring-break party to Cancun earlier this month. Some seniors from St. Francis Prep in Fresh Meadows took the trip over Easter hiatus two weeks ago. Days later, an outbreak of flu-like symptoms erupted at the school, leaving about 200 kids complaining of being ill. Yesterday, city health officials confirmed that eight students "have probable human swine influenza" after testing positive for Influenza A, which officials say causes the swine strain of disease. "We're very concerned about what may...

The fact the current 'swine flu' has shown to be contagious is alarming. So far it has shown to have a 6% mortality rate. It may not seem like much, but please consider the following: The deadly influenza panic in 1918 had a mortality rate of under 1%. This virus went on to kill tens of thousands of healthy people a day in large cities and up to 100 million people world wide. You see, viruses like the current 'swine flu' thrive on immune systems that are robust and healthy. That is why the people that have so far died...

GENEVA (AP) — The World Health Organization warned countries around the world Saturday to be on alert for any unusual flu outbreaks after a unique new swine flu virus was implicated in possibly dozens of human deaths in North America. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the outbreak in Mexico and the United States constituted a "public health emergency of international concern." The decision means countries around the world will be asked to step up reporting and surveillance of the disease, which she said had "pandemic potential" because it is an animal virus strain infecting people. But the agency cannot at...

The swine flu virus that is responsible for an outbreak in Mexico and has been detected in the southwestern United States has the potential to cause a pandemic, a top international health official said today. "It has pandemic potential," Margaret Chan, the director-general of the World Health Organization, told reporters during a telephone briefing. "It is infecting people." Chan held the briefing after cutting short a trip to the United States so she could rush back to the WHO's headquarters in Geneva to convene an emergency meeting of special experts to decide what steps should be taken to contain the...

New York City health officials say about 75 students at a Queens high school have fallen ill with flu-like symptoms and testing is under way to make sure they're not stricken with the deadly type of swine flu that is ravaging Mexico and has sparked fears of a pandemic. Dr. Don Weiss of the city Department of Health said yesterday that a team of agency doctors and investigators was dispatched to the private St. Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows Thursday after students reported fevers, sore throats, coughs, aches and pains. The handful of students who remained at the school...

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A deadly strain of flu never seen before has killed as many as 61 people in Mexico and has spread into the United States, where several people were reported ill. Mexico's government said on Friday that at least 16 people have died of the disease in central Mexico and that it may also have been responsible for 45 other deaths. The World Health Organization said genetic tests of the virus in 12 of the Mexican victims had the same genetic structure as a new strain of swine flu, designated H1N1, seen in seven people in California...

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. —  The Veterans Affairs Department is investigating whether there's a link between a patient's positive HIV test and unsterilized equipment that may have exposed thousands of veterans to infectious diseases. The positive test was the first reported since the department warned veterans treated at three clinics that they might be at risk. The VA previously reported that hepatitis was found in 16 patients, but the agency cautioned there was no way to prove that the patients contracted the illnesses because of treatment at their facilities. In an e-mail late Friday, the agency said it was investigating "the possibility of...

Health officials said today that they are investigating a fourth case of measles at Children's Hospital, where the infection might have occurred. A news release from the state Department of Health did not offer any information about the age or whereabouts of the latest infected person. The department announced Tuesday that two Westmoreland County preschoolers and their 33-year-old father had been diagnosed with measles. The health department said the exposure to measles might have occurred in the Children's Hospital emergency room on March 10, or between 8 p.m. March 21 and 11 a.m. March 22; between 6 p.m. on March...

San Francisco - Even as tuberculosis rates decline in the United States, drug-resistant strains of the disease showing up in states with large immigrant populations and are becoming increasingly hard to treat. Researchers are concerned about this trend while funding for labor-intensive disease control programs is being cut in cities such as San Francisco, which has the highest TB rates in the country.

Thursday March 19, 2009 Harvard AIDS Expert Says Pope is Correct on Condom Distribution Making AIDS Worse By John-Henry Westen   March 19, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, has said that the evidence confirms that the Pope is correct in his assessment that condom distribution exacerbates the problem of AIDS.  "The pope is correct," Green told National Review Online Wednesday, "or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope's comments."  "There is," Green added, "a consistent association...

WASHINGTON — At least 3 percent of District of Columbia residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that far surpasses the 1 percent threshold that constitutes a "generalized and severe" epidemic, according to a report to be released by health officials Monday

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A Minnesota company has won federal approval to become the first in the U.S. to market an E. coli vaccine for cattle, a new weapon against a foodborne disease that can cause serious illness in people and even death. Epitopix LLC was given a conditional license from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to sell its vaccine. Nayyera Haq, a USDA spokeswoman, called it "an important step toward improving food safety in this country," and a major beef group agreed. "It really is a major milestone for our industry," Michelle Rossman, director of beef safety research for the...

A person has been infected but is not ill with the Ebola Reston virus after coming into contact with sick pigs in the northern Philippines, the health secretary said today, adding that the risk to others is negligible. Blood samples were taken from 50 pig farm and slaughterhouse workers in Bulucan and Pangasinan provinces where pigs were found to be infected with the virus in December. One tested positive for Ebola Reston virus antibodies, indicating the worker was exposed to the virus more than six months ago, Health Secretary Francisco Duque said. The person, whose identity has not been released,...