October 13, 2009
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Good health is no guarantee swine flu won't put you in the hospital.
Swine flu can knock out just about anyone.
Nearly half of adults hospitalized with swine flu didn't have asthma or any other chronic health problem, the Centers and Disease Control and Prevention has found after looking at 1,900 cases of confirmed swine flu in grown-ups and children.
The new H1N1 "virus can be serious, even in healthy people with no underlying conditions," the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat said in a briefing. "Some totally healthy people suffer this very rapid deterioration."
The findings are sobering and run contrary to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found 73 percent of patients hospitalized with swine flu had an underlying condition, such as asthma, diabetes and pregnancy.
The latest data do confirm that pregnant women are at special risk for problems. Some six percent of the adult cases in the CDC's analysis were pregnant women, six times their number in the general population, NPR's Richard Knox reports.
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