Transferrable at 10 Feet, the H1N1 Flu is Spreading Fast, Before

the Start of Traditional Flu Season

Unlike flu strains of the recent past, the H1N1 virus is especially dangerous to young, otherwise healthy people - some of whom have died -  researchers tell Scott Pelley.   Pelley talks to the people battling the pandemic, including those on the front lines at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, for a 60 MINUTES report to be broadcast Sunday, Oct. 18  (7:00-8:00PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. 

"This is one of the really tragic parts of this epidemic. That people who are in the prime of their life-- totally healthy can suddenly become so sick," says Rear Adm. Anne Schuchat, the Center for Disease Control's chief officer in the war on swine flu. She is battling a pandemic, or global outbreak, of H1N1 - the first flu pandemic in 41 years.

Dr. Peter Palese of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City has studied the swine flu virus and knows the reason why the young are particularly susceptible.  "There were similar viruses circulating in the 1930s and the 1940s and therefore people who were born before 1950 have antibodies, have a protective immune response against such a virus..." he tells Pelley.  "Therefore the older people are better protected against...H1N1 virus than are young people." 

Complicating matters is the tendency of swine flu to get into the lungs. Schuchat took Pelley into her laboratory.   "I think some of these slides suggest that this virus is able to infect the lower airway -- the lungs themselves, not just the upper airways -- and that it's able to cause a major reaction there which interferes with breathing,"  she says.

That's what happened to 15-yr.-old Luke Duvall, a robust high school football player from Atkins, Ark., who was rushed to the emergency room early this month with difficulty breathing. Duvall wound up in a pediatric intensive care unit on a ventilator and was close to death.  He has improved somewhat, but remains very sick.

Much of the rest of Duval's football team and their opponents in a game Luke played in also came down with flu symptoms, which is hardly surprising, as Palese's studies show that the H1N1 flu is transferrable from 10 feet away.  But they all got better at home.  Duval is one of the small number of mostly kids who are getting serious cases, the kind of cases that make Schuchat's job all the more critical .

"Yes, it's much lower than one percent.  But what we're seeing here are those very, very unfortunate times where it is able to kill or cause life threatening disease," Schuchat  tells Pelley.