The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the virus was confirmed in eight more states overnight but the death toll stayed at one - the Mexican toddler who died in Texas.
CDC said there were now 141 confirmed cases in the U.S., up from 109 on Thursday. The flu is now in 19 states, up from 11, according to federal figures. Separately a few states reported slightly higher numbers.
Federal health authorities sought to reassure the public that - aside from people with flu symptoms or nonessential travel plans to Mexico - public transportation remained safe.
"There's not an increased risk there," Dr. Richard Besser, acting CDC director, said Friday. "If you have the flu or flu-like symptoms, you shouldn't be getting on an airplane or you shouldn't be getting in the subway, but for the general population that's quite fine to do," he said.
Houston-based Continental Airlines, which has over 500 flights per week between the U.S. and Mexico, became the first U.S. carrier to curtail service. Many travelers have become increasingly concerned about going to Mexico, though authorities there said new cases and the death rate was leveling off.
Mexico has confirmed 300 swine flu cases but stopped reporting suspected infections when the number approached 2,500. There have been a dozen confirmed deaths there from the flu, although reports have indicated that roughly 120 may have died from it.
"We were already experiencing soft market conditions due to the economy, and now our Mexico routes in particular have extra weakness," Continental Chairman and Chief Executive Larry Kellner said in a statement Friday.
It wasn't immediately clear whether other airlines would follow Continental's lead. "We are hearing that there is a softening of demand to and from Mexico," said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transportation Association, which represents airlines.
Clinics and hospital emergency rooms in New York, California and some other states are seeing a surge in patients with coughs and sneezes that might have been ignored before the outbreak.
The outbreak even touched the White House, which disclosed that an aide to Energy Secretary Steven Chu apparently got sick helping arrange President Barack Obama's recent trip to Mexico but that the aide did not fly on Air Force One and never posed a risk to the president.
The aide, Marc Griswold, a former Secret Service agent who was doing advance work for Chu, told The Associated Press when reached at his Department of Energy office Friday that he was feeling better.
He declined to elaborate beyond comments in the Washington Post Friday.
"We're not the Typhoid Mary family, for goodness sake," he told the Post. "We've been told that we're not contagious. We're already past the seven-day mark for that."
So far U.S. cases are mostly fairly mild and, officials said, most so far haven't required a doctor's care.
Still, the U.S. is taking extraordinary precautions - including shipping millions of doses of anti-flu drugs to states in case they're needed.
Late Thursday the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was buying 13 million new treatment courses of antiviral drugs to replenish and grow the U.S. strategic stockpile. Eleven million treatment courses have been sent to states - 25 percent of each state's allotment - and the U.S. also announced plans Thursday to send 400,000 treatment courses to Mexico.
The World Health Organization is warning of an imminent pandemic because scientists cannot predict what a brand-new virus might do. A key concern is whether this spring outbreak will surge again in the fall.
The CDC added the following states Friday to its list of confirmed cases: New Jersey with five cases, Delaware with four, Illinois with three, Colorado and Virginia with two, and Minnesota and Nebraska each with one. The CDC reported one case in Kentucky and none in Georgia, while Georgia officials report one case there - that of a sickened Kentucky resident who traveled to Georgia.
CDC previously had confirmed cases in New York, Texas, California, South Carolina, Kansas, Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Michigan and Nevada.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2009/5/220073