WASHINGTON: In Austin, so many parents are rushing their children to the Dell Children’s

Medical Centre of Central Texas with H1N1 flu symptoms that the hospital has had to set up tents in the parking lot to cope with the onslaught.

“We’re completely swamped”, said Dr Air Brown, a paediatrician whose office had to call in extra nurses to handle the volume of patients.

“It’s been extraordinarily busy. We have a small parking lot to begin with. People now are circling the neighborhood to try to find a place to park and waiting room is completely packed,” he said over the weekend.

After months of warnings and frantic preparations, the second wave of the Influenza A(H1N1) pandemic is starting to be felt around the United States and the neighboring Mexico as doctors, clinics, hospitals and schools report rapidly increasing numbers of patients with H1N1 flu symptoms.

“H1N1 is spreading widely throughout the US,” said Mr Thomas Frieden, director of the federal Centres For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, at a briefing on Friday.

At least 26 states, including Maryland and Virginia, are now reporting widespread flu activity, up from 21 a week earlier, the CDC reported.

Despite new federal guidelines aimed at keeping schools open, the pandemic has already prompted scattered school closings in recent weeks, including 42 schools that closed in eight states on Friday, affecting more than 16,000 students.

Many colleges and universities have been hit particularly hard, forcing some to open separate dorms for sick students. Ninety-one percent of the 267 institutions being surveyed by the American College Health Association are now reporting flu cases.

In Mexico, 3,000 schools were closed earlier last week as Mexicans braced themselves for a second wave that may be larger than the last spring became a pandemic. The number has seem dropped to 128.

Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said Mexico could see up to five million cases of H1N1 during this winter’s flu season and the death toll could reach 2,000. Some hospitals already have the same number of H1N1 patients as they have in April, he said last Thursday.

Daily diagnoses reached higher levels this month than the H1N1 peak in April, with 483 new cases in just one day this month alone.

It is unlikely there will be large-scale closings of schools and stadiums, however, because health officials know the virus is usually mild if treated early.

Mexico had 29,417 reported cases and 226 deaths as of last Friday.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says more than 300,000 cases of H1N1 have been confirmed throughout the world, and more than 3,900 people have died from the virus.

The United Nations health agency expects that one-third of the world’s over six billion people could be infected by the pandemic, which was declared in June and could last for three years.

The WHO has said pharmaceutical firm can produce only three billion doses of H1N1 vaccines a year, covering less than half the global population.

But it admits not everyone may need vaccination. “Most people will do well without the vaccine,” WHO vaccine chief Marie-Paule Kieny said.

She said most people infected with the pandemic strain of the H1N1 virus have a mild illness and recover by themselves.

WASHINGTON POST, ASSOCIATED PRESS, REUTERS

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