06 May,2009 11:59 AM IST | | Agencies
A woman from Texas is the first US resident to die from swine flu, health officials said after a Mexican boy died last month in the United States due to the H1N1 virus.
The Texas Department of State Health Services said on its website that a woman from Cameron County who had chronic underlying health conditions died earlier this week after contracting the H1N1 virus. No more details were available about the woman, whose death from the new strain of influenza was announced as US health officials confirmed a spike in the number of confirmed infections, but played down the uptick as likely due to more widespread testing.
"There are over 403 confirmed cases," up from 286 reported on Monday in the United States, Richard Besser, acting head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told a daily news briefing. The spike "doesn't reflect transmission as much as that we're catching up with the testing," Besser added.
"As we get these test kits out to state labs and as they get up to speed, some of the backlog that they've had on testing will go away and we'll see a big bump in the number of cases," he said.
