Indiana’s number of confirmed swine flu cases rose to three Friday — up from a single case earlier this week — as the federal government released updated figures showing 141 cases of the illness nationwide.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said Indiana had the two additional cases as of midday Friday. She had no other details and directed questions to state health officials.
Amber Finkelstein, a spokeswoman at the state’s emergency operations center, said she could confirm only a single swine flu case in Indiana and said questions about additional cases would have to wait until State Health Commissioner Dr. Judy Monroe holds an afternoon news conference.
Marion County Health Department spokesman John Althardt said he could not confirm a report by television station WTHR that the two new confirmed cases had come from Indianapolis.
“The state will be the one announcing the new results,” he said.
Marion County’s health director said this week that four suspected swine flu cases from the county — the state’s most populous — had been sent to the CDC for testing and two had proven not to be the virus. Tests were pending on the two other samples.
On Tuesday, state officials said a University of Notre Dame student who has fully recovered was the state’s first confirmed swine flu case. State health officials said Thursday that the student’s source of infection remains unknown.
That student had not recently traveled to Mexico nor had any known contact with someone who recently visited Mexico, where authorities have confirmed 15 deaths from the virus and a total of 343 swine flu cases.
Indiana’s swine flu cases grew to three a day after the state announced that it had imposed a ban on face-to-face meetings between inmates in the state’s prisons and visitors, to prevent the virus from reaching prison’s confined spaces.
The no-visit policy was imposed Wednesday at all adult and juvenile prisons to safeguard the roughly 27,000 prisoners and 8,000 employees in Indiana’s prisons.
At least one Indiana school district has temporarily canceled classes due to swine flu concerns — northern Indiana’s Wabash City Schools, where a middle school student had been under a doctor’s care and had flu-like symptoms.
And at DePauw University in Greencastle, school spokesman Ken Owen said that eight students believed to have a common, seasonal flu virus were moved midweek into secluded housing away from other students and kept out of classes as a precaution.
Owen said two of those students remained secluded as of Friday morning but were expected to be released by the end of the day. He said the school submitted five viral samples to the state’s labs as a precaution and one has come back as not being swine flu.
“There’s nothing to suggest this was anything more than a common flu strain, and maybe not even as strong as one that hit our campus in February,” he said. “Everyone is feeling fine.”
On the Net:
CDC Swine Flu update: http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/
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