Influenza-like illnesses are now higher than levels generally seen at the peak of the flu season, federal health officials said Friday, even as they dismissed media reports from a day earlier that 1 in 5 children had contracted swine flu during the first weeks of October.Pandemic H1N1 influenza activity continues to spread, with 46 states reporting widespread activity, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.Since Aug. 30, there have been 8,200 hospitalizations from laboratory-confirmed infections caused by the swine flu virus and 411 deaths in the United States. That brings the totals since the pandemic outbreak in April to more than 20,000 hospitalizations and more than 1,000 deaths.There were 11 new pediatric deaths in the week ending Oct. 17, bringing the total since April to 102. In a typical flu season, there are 40 to 50 deaths among children.Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the CDC director, said that media reports Thursday about 20 percent of children contracting swine flu were a misinterpretation of the data and that the numbers were undoubtedly much lower.That data was from a CDC-conducted telephone survey of 14,000 randomly selected households. Residents were asked if they had suffered influenza-like illness between Oct. 1 and Oct. 11. The researchers found that 1 in 5 children and 7 percent of adults had suffered such symptoms, but no effort was made to confirm the nature of the illnesses.Frieden said that although infection rates of 1 in 5 children have been observed in some communities during the peaks of infection, it is likely that the majority of children in the survey simply suffered from colds and sniffles.“The data simply show that kids get a lot of infections,” he said.As for the swine flu vaccine, which has been slower in arriving than federal authorities had expected, Frieden said that 16.1 million doses are available and that at least 11.3 million had been shipped as of Wednesday, an increase of 5.4 million doses from the previous week.“Vaccine production is much less predictable than we would wish,” he added. “We are nowhere near where we thought we would be by now or where the manufacturers had predicted we would be. Vaccination is our strongest tool, and not having enough of it is enormously frustrating.”Nicole Lurie, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for preparedness and response, said Friday that the U.S. should expect to have 42 million doses by mid-November, about 8 million less than earlier estimates.Frieden said the severity of the swine flu virus remains about the same as it was in the spring, and it is generally comparable to that of the seasonal flu. But the ethnic composition of those infected is changing, Lyn Finelli, head of flu surveillance at the CDC said at a meeting Thursday.During the spring, Latinos had a disproportionately high number of infections, presumably because of their contacts with people returning from Mexico, where the virus is thought to have originated. This fall, the proportion of Latinos affected has declined, while the number of blacks infected has grown for reasons that are not clear.There has been some concern that swine flu is especially severe among American Indians, but the CDC has received reports of only two deaths among that group, she said. Some researchers fear that states are not fully reporting such deaths, however.The World Health Organization also reported Friday that there have been 4,999 swine flu deaths through Oct. 18, up 264 from the week before. Because most countries have stopped counting individual flu cases, however, that number probably is an underestimate, the agency said.

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