Apr. 27--As reports of swine flu cases accelerated worldwide, Sacramento County public health and church officials temporarily closed a Catholic school in Fair Oaks on Sunday because a student there is ill with what may be the new strain of influenza.
Local testing showed the ailing teenager from St. Mel School didn't have a standard flu strain, so samples were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which could have results as early as today.
A St. Mel seventh-grader had been in Mexico during the school's Easter break, then became ill and went home early on Monday, the first day of class after the break, said Kevin Eckery, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento.
Two days later, an additional seventh-grader became ill and by Friday seven of the school's 40 seventh-graders were unwell, four of them with flulike symptoms, he said. One of those seventh-graders, but not the one who went to Mexico, is the student whose specimen was sent to the CDC, Eckery said.
The parent of one of the stricken St. Mel students called county health officials on Friday after seeing news coverage of the swine flu outbreaks.
"Right now staff is calling every family at school," said Dr. Glennah Trochet, Sacramento County's public health officer, in an effort to find out who might be sick and to encourage testing as appropriate. The county was aiming to complete those calls Sunday night.
Parents of the student whose test results were sent to Atlanta were advised to consult with their doctor about possible use of antiviral medication, Trochet said.
That student, whose name and age are not being released by school or health officials, had only mild symptoms and is recovering, Eckery said.
"No one has been violently ill. No one has had those severe symptoms" reported in some of the cases in Mexico, he said.
St. Mel, a K-8 school with 275 students, will be closed at least through Wednesday. All after-school activities also have been suspended.
"As a parent, I'm happy they pulled the trigger and closed the school as fast as they did," said Michael Pritchard, whose 11-year-old son, Christopher, goes to St. Mel -- and is feeling fine so far. "I'm less worried now, because they took preemptive action," he said.
The closure, which Pritchard learned about in an e-mail from the school Sunday afternoon, spurred a frantic hunt for alternative child care, Pritchard said.
"When the e-mail went out, everyone went into a scramble mode," he said. "I got calls from two parents" with offers like "if you take my kids for one day, we can take your kid for a day."
Another parent, Valerie Torres, said she hadn't been worried on Saturday when her fifth-grade son was coughing, but now that she's heard about the closure she plans to get him tested.
"He doesn't have a fever, but I'm going to call Kaiser and make sure it's not just a cold," Torres said.
Shutting down the school for a few days is the right thing to do, said Dr. Cristina Solis, a physician who has three children at St. Mel, in the eighth, sixth and third grades. She heard about the school closure at church Sunday morning.
"I'm surprised, and I'm also concerned about the students who are sick," she said.
In Sacramento and around the world, health officials are still trying to understand how virulent this flu is, how easily it spreads, and why it has killed people in Mexico in age groups that don't generally die of the flu.
"We have all these cases in the United States, Spain, France, Israel, New Zealand, and almost all were mild except in Mexico," said Dr. Christian Sandrock, an infectious disease specialist at UC Davis.
"My question is, what's up with Mexico? Something is not totally making sense, and that happens in outbreaks," especially in the early days, Sandrock said.
It could be weeks before specialists learn enough about those who died in Mexico to determine whether they were more vulnerable or the whether flu was more deadly there, he said.
Meanwhile, he said, the disease could easily continue to mutate, becoming more severe or more mild, or developing new resistance to medications.
"It's going to spread quite a bit," Sandrock said. "We're going to see a lot more numbers in a lot more locations."
Sandrock, Trochet and state health officials continued to advise people to take routine precautions to stay healthy, and urged them to stay home from work or school if they don't feel well.
Symptoms include sore throat, fever over 100 degrees and achiness. People do not need to rush to the emergency room if they feel mildly ill, and the outbreak hasn't reached a point where people need to wear masks as in Mexico, Trochet said.
In California, there are still seven confirmed cases of the new swine flu, which also contains elements of avian and human flu strains, said Dr. Gilbert Chavez, deputy director of the state's center for infectious diseases. The sample sent from the Fair Oaks student is the only one submitted by the state that is pending at CDC labs now, he said.
By Thursday, a state lab in Richmond should have the capability to start doing its own testing for the new swine flu, speeding up diagnoses, Chavez said.
------
Call The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg, (916) 321-1086. Staff writers Robert Lewis and Hudson Sangree contributed to this report.
-----
To see more of The Sacramento Bee, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.sacbee.com/.
Copyright (c) 2009, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.