Ten percent of the freshman class at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy has swine flu, and that number could rise in the coming days as more test results come in.

”We were expecting to see the number go up before it came back down because we had a lot of tests out still,” Petty Officer Ryan Doss, an academy spokesman, said Monday. “The flipside is that the number of people coming into the clinic feeling symptomatic has gone down. We hope it’s an indication that this is going to keep declining, but we’re going to stay prepared for anything.”

By last Friday, there were eight confirmed cases of swine flu, also called novel H1N1 influenza, with 22 more on Sunday, three early Monday and four more Monday afternoon. The total, 37, consists of 31 out of a class of 285 “swabs,” the newest students at the school currently taking part in a mandatory summer session, four cadets who were training them and two clinic staff members.

The academy submitted five more samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing Monday. Thirteen tests are pending.

”We’re sending more samples in for testing than we originally did because we’ve seen cases of H1N1 that are not as severe,” Doss said. “People are not showing all the symptoms that medical staffs have seen throughout the country.”

Source/Full Story: TheDay.com

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