First Confirmed Swine Flu Case 'starting to Feel Better'
Graeme Pacitti taking anti-viral drug Tamiflu after becoming first person to catch swine flu within UK
It was a mates' night out to celebrate a marriage. Eight days ago, Graeme Pacitti and friends from his amateur football team gathered to welcome the newly married man back from his honeymoon in Mexico.
As Pacitti and the others sat around Iain Askham, they noticed he seemed tired. That was put down to jetlag but 48 hours later, Askham and his wife, Dawn, were swept into an isolation ward at Monklands hospital, 20 miles away in Airdrie, the first two British cases of swine flu.
Today, Pacitti, the goalkeeper for their six-a-side team FC Mallard and a clerical worker at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, was confirmed as the first person to catch swine flu within the UK.
The result left him feeling "really disappointed", he said. "Today I started to feel better than I have done all week. I'm quite gutted."
Confined at home with his mother Lesley, her boyfriend, and his younger brother Alan, he has been taking the anti-viral drug Tamiflu and nursing an aching head and throat.
"It started last Saturday when I started to feel like I had an upset stomach. From then my throat began to get sore," he said. "The worst was when I started to get headaches and feel quite feverish."
Yet earlier this week, Pacitti assumed he had avoided catching the virus. He had initially been cleared after he and two other members of that group out drinking with Askham and his best man, Neil Gardner, 26, developed mild cold-like symptoms.
But earlier this week, after Pacitti started to feel unwell, further tests confirmed he was carrying the influenza A-type virus – the group which includes swine flu, known to the experts at H1N1. But that kind of flu virus is rare in late spring. That immediately made it likely that Pacitti was the first case of onward transmission in Britain. It has already happened in the US, Canada, Spain and Germany.
As Pacitti and the others sat around Iain Askham, they noticed he seemed tired. That was put down to jetlag but 48 hours later, Askham and his wife, Dawn, were swept into an isolation ward at Monklands hospital, 20 miles away in Airdrie, the first two British cases of swine flu.
Today, Pacitti, the goalkeeper for their six-a-side team FC Mallard and a clerical worker at Falkirk Royal Infirmary, was confirmed as the first person to catch swine flu within the UK.
The result left him feeling "really disappointed", he said. "Today I started to feel better than I have done all week. I'm quite gutted."
Confined at home with his mother Lesley, her boyfriend, and his younger brother Alan, he has been taking the anti-viral drug Tamiflu and nursing an aching head and throat.
"It started last Saturday when I started to feel like I had an upset stomach. From then my throat began to get sore," he said. "The worst was when I started to get headaches and feel quite feverish."
Yet earlier this week, Pacitti assumed he had avoided catching the virus. He had initially been cleared after he and two other members of that group out drinking with Askham and his best man, Neil Gardner, 26, developed mild cold-like symptoms.
But earlier this week, after Pacitti started to feel unwell, further tests confirmed he was carrying the influenza A-type virus – the group which includes swine flu, known to the experts at H1N1. But that kind of flu virus is rare in late spring. That immediately made it likely that Pacitti was the first case of onward transmission in Britain. It has already happened in the US, Canada, Spain and Germany.
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