State health officials say the number of confirmed cases of swine flu in Arizona is now at 49 - up from the previous figure of 17.Arizona Department of Health spokeswoman Laura Oxley says the new confirmed cases were sent to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week and took a while to identify because of the backlog there.
Arizona has an additional 150 to 200 possible cases of swine flu at the CDC for testing and Oxley says the number of confirmed cases will certainly increase.
She says the state laboratory hopes to start testing its own cases on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, students at three Phoenix-area schools that were closed because of the swine flu returned to class Tuesday.
Moon Mountain Elementary School in northwest Phoenix was closed as of Thursday, and the Tarwater Elementary and Hartford Sylvia Encinas Elementary schools in the Chandler Unified School District were closed starting Friday. One student at each of the three schools tested positive.
All three schools were ordered closed for seven days.
Ten public schools in Nogales closed for a week, starting Monday, after one student tested positive _ even though the elementary school student had recovered before the closures were announced. Santa Cruz County health officials had recommended closing only the school the child attends and one neighboring school.
In Nogales, barber Rene Valencia said his 14-year-old eighth-grader would be having a vacation this week. While he isn't worried about his son getting into trouble or being exposed to the flu while hanging around home or with friends, Valencia said he thought school officials overreacted.
Officials with the Tucson and Marana unified districts, which each had one middle school student with a confirmed swine flu case, and on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, where two high school students were among four positive cases, did not close schools.
In a letter distributed Monday through Maricopa County school districts, Dr. Bob England recommended against any more school closures - barring a significant cluster of cases in a school.
He also said he was not recommending that school events such as proms, field trips or graduations be canceled.
"It appears that the virus is already broadly spread in the community,'' he said. "Therefore, a handful of individual school dismissals will not help to slow its spread.''
He added that closing all schools for a time might help but the disease doesn't seem severe enough to merit the disruptions.
SWINE FLU LINKS:
Preparedness - http://www.wearepublichealth.org
CDC web site on Swine Flu - http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/
Statewide - http://www.azdhs.gov
Maricopa County - http://www.maricopa.gov/Public_Health/
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