No new cases of confirmed swine flu

• By SANDY DAVIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 5, 2009 - Page: 6A

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There were no new confirmed cases of swine flu in Louisiana on Monday, but state health officials were still waiting for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to test 21 samples from Louisiana.

“The CDC is telling states that they’re confirming the swine flu virus in approximately 99 percent of the cases they are testing,” Gov. Bobby Jindal said Monday at a news conference at the Governor’s Mansion.

Jindal said the CDC warned the state to expect a “high rate of confirmation” for the swine flu virus in the samples the state has sent to the federal lab.

So far, Louisiana has seven confirmed cases of swine flu: five of them are students in Lafayette Parish, one is a student in Ascension Parish and one is a student at a New Orleans school.

But on Monday, the CDC erroneously listed Louisiana as having 14 confirmed cases. That misinformation stayed on the agency’s Web site for most of the day.

“That was a clerical error,” said Lauren Mendes, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health and Hospitals. “They double-counted our cases.”

It is taking the CDC, which is swamped with samples from nearly every state, two to four days to finish testing each sample.

Of the five suspected Louisiana samples sent to the CDC on Monday, four are from students in Lafayette Parish and one is from an adult in Ascension Parish, Jindal said.

Those four Lafayette Parish students attend schools already closed because of the outbreak, Jindal said. Two attend Our Lady of Fatima School, one attends St. Pius Elementary School, and the last one attends Cathedral-Carmel School.

Also on Monday, St. Jude the Apostle Elementary School in Baton Rouge closed when an eighth-grade student tested positive for type A flu.

Swine flu is a subtype of type A flu.

“We don’t think it’s swine flu,” said Karen Jakuback, principal of St. Jude. “But we want to be cautious.”

The student attended a class field trip on Friday and a middle school dance on Saturday, Jakuback said.