Innards of H1N1 Virus Resemble 'Flu Sausage' On March 28, one
month before news of the swine flu outbreak headlined worldwide,
a nine-year-old girl in Imperial County, California, ran a fever
of 104.3°F. She had not rolled up her sleeve for this year’s flu
vaccine, but that day she opened her mouth and stuck out her
tongue for a cotton swab that scooped up mucous samples from her
throat. Her mucus arrived at the Naval Health Research Center in
San Diego where technicians tested it and classified the virus
in it as “unsubtypable” influenza A – it was something new. The
lab forwarded her mucus to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, where it arrived on April 17,
four days after Mexico confirmed its first case of swine flu.
Embedded in the girl’s mucus was a strain of the virus that was
already sweeping the globe. To date, 41 countries have confirmed
more than 11,000 swine flu cases, a global contagion that has
proved less deadly than scientists feared at its onset. The CDC
discove