SWINE FLU: Pregnant woman at significantly higher risk - 1 in 8 deaths healthy, pregnant women

“We have also noticed that with pregnant women, their condition will deteriorate quite fast,” said Tim Smyth, deputy director general of health for New South Wales, Australia’s most-populous state.

Christchurch Hospital, the main public hospital in the city in New Zealand, has treated two critically ill pregnant women with severe viral pneumonia, said Geoff Shaw, a consultant in the intensive care unit. One was 21 weeks pregnant and the other 34 weeks, he said.

“It’s almost unheard of for healthy, pregnant women to get a severe, life-threatening pneumonia, and we have two at the same time,” Shaw said over the telephone last week. “We have never seen that before.”

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clipped from www.bloomberg.com July 29 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu in pregnancy can cause life-threatening disease and warrants treatment with antiviral drugs as soon as possible, a study in the medical journal Lancet found. The study, to be published in the Aug. 8 issue, found about one in eight people who died after contracting the new virus was pregnant. The hospitalization rate for pregnant women was more than four times that of the general population, the study showed. The findings support advice from health authorities including the World Health Organization that pregnancy may put women at greater risk of developing complications from the pandemic H1N1 flu. The data collected and analyzed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are the most comprehensive available to date on the impact of this novel flu virus among pregnant women, the Atlanta-based agency said in a statement today.