A two-year-old child in Texas has become the first fatality from swine flu in the United States, officials said Wednesday. Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, known as "patient zero" survived the earliest documented case of swine flu.
"A child has died from the H1N1 virus," the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control Dr. Richard Besser told CNN's "American Morning" on Wednesday. "As a parent and a pediatrician, my heart goes out to the family."
The child is the first person to die of swine flu outside of Mexico where the virus has caused more than 159 deaths and roughly 2,500 illnesses.
So far, the World Health Organization (WHO) says at least 112 cases have been confirmed worldwide.
According to the WHO's figures, the number of deaths from the virus was seven in Mexico. But with the U.S. death -- confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) -- the number rises to eight.
The world body did not immediately provide a breakdown for the additional cases that had been substantiated through lab tests Wednesday. Nor was it clear whether the U.S. death was part of its updated figure.
The WHO list also does not include 11 additional cases reported by New Zealand health officials, four by Spain, five cases in Britain, three in Germany or one confirmed by Costa Rica's health ministry.
In the United States, the states of California, Indiana, New York and Texas also were reporting additional cases not confirmed by the CDC.
Earlier, Mexican doctors said they believed a young boy who lives near a remote pig farm was the earliest documented case of the swine flu outbreak that has killed scores of people and spread across four continents.
Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez, known as "patient zero" by his doctors, survived the virus and playfully credits ice cream for helping him feel better.
Edgar lives with his family in the 3,000-population village of La Gloria in the state of Veracruz, where a flu outbreak was reported on April 2. State officials arrived and took samples from dozens of people.
Lab tests confirmed that Edgar was the only patient in Veracruz to test positive for the swine flu virus; the others had contracted a common flu. Health officials returned to Edgar's sample only after cases of the new flu strain were spotted around the country.
"In this case, there's a patient who turned out to be positive for the swine-flu virus, with the exception that at that time in no region of the world it had been established as an etiological, epidemic cause," said Mexico Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova.
His mother -- and many other people in La Gloria, about two hours' drive north of Mexico City -- blame the virus on a huge pig farm in the neighborhood. Officials have conducted tests at the farm owned by U.S. company Smithfield Foods, but those tests came back negative.
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