Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu infected hundreds of students in at least 17 U.S. colleges in the first weeks of school, providing evidence the virus is resurging as it races through sorority events and football practices.

The U.S. is undergoing the highest influenza rates for this time of year since the 1968 Hong Kong flu, said Joe Quimby, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. School officials said they are preparing buses to transport the sick, isolation dorms and vaccination drive-throughs. College students are the least likely age group to avail themselves of the shots, key this year because young people are most susceptible to the H1N1 strain, health officials said.

“You can envision 200 young people being stuffed into the basement of a smoky fraternity -- what a perfect breeding ground for disease,” said Jim Turner, director of the Department of Student Health at the University of Virginia and president of the American College Health Association. He has been tracking outbreaks at U.S. colleges.

Mississippi State University, in Starkville, has had more than 250 people with flu-like symptoms since July 15, said Robert Cadenhead, administrator of the student health center, in a telephone interview. The University of Kansas in Lawrence counted more than 100 sick, according to Todd Cohen, a spokesman for the school. The University of Tennessee in Knoxville estimates at least 100 students showed flu symptoms since classes started Aug. 19, said Amy Blakely, a spokeswoman.

“This is the type of flu activity that we’ve been preparing for,” the CDC’s Quimby said in a telephone interview from the agency’s Atlanta headquarters. “The H1N1 flu never went away this summer.”

Not a ‘Serious Disease’

College students “don’t think flu is a serious disease, so they don’t need to be vaccinated from it,” said Allan Markus, a doctor and director of campus health services at Arizona State University in Tempe. His school started seasonal flu vaccines during its welcome week, counting on parents to help convince students to get shots, he said.

During a normal flu season, which typically lasts from November through March, schools provide vaccines at campus health clinics and may recommend that students wash their hands and cover their coughs, messages that are often lost on college students. This year, with the number of infections already starting to grow, they are doubling down on those efforts, giving seasonal flu shots more than a month early and posting hand sanitizer dispensers and flu safety posters across campus.

The outbreaks are unusual at this time of year and Turner said it will take a few weeks for scientists to determine whether college-borne clusters of infection turn into widespread outbreaks across states.

Dominant Strain

Swine flu is now the dominant strain in the world, and countries in the Northern Hemisphere should prepare for a wave of infections, the World Health Organization in Geneva said on Aug. 28. Laboratory tests have confirmed H1N1 in 2,185 deaths and more than 209,000 infections worldwide, though the majority of infected patients are never tested, the WHO said.

Flu season in the U.S. typically kills about 36,000 people annually, according to the CDC. The U.S. has already had more than 80 outbreaks at summer camps, unprecedented at that time of year, the CDC said.

The health agency is developing vaccine ads aimed at recalcitrant college students to be distributed through popular Web services including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, said Kris Sheedy, a director at the CDC’s public communications program, in an interview at their Atlanta headquarters.

Mid-October Vaccine

Seasonal flu shots have arrived or will soon be available at most U.S. colleges. A separate vaccine for swine flu, which may require two shots given over a three-week period, won’t be ready until mid-October, the CDC said on Aug. 18. That’s too late this semester to curb outbreaks among students with no natural immunity.

Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, has seen 75 sick patients in three weeks. Some of the cases were attributed to students attending sorority rush before school started, said Gary Shutt, a spokesman for the school.

Sorority rush is conducive to spreading flu because women must spend a week traveling in groups and meeting with each sorority house, said JB Feldman, a 21-year-old computer science major at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Sorority Rush

“In sorority recruitment, if someone feels sick and they want to join a sorority, they’re probably going to go anyway,” Feldman said in a telephone interview. He is in a fraternity, where there’s no formal recruitment process. None of his closest friends have had any swine flu symptoms.

“For me, it’s not really a concern,” Feldman said. “Everything I’ve seen says it’s no more deadly, nor any more contagious than a regular flu. We get e-mails all the time. Basically any organization on campus gets lectured about just washing your hands and stuff.”

Colleges are encouraging professors and campus organizations to be lenient about absences. Sick students should stay home, and a doctor’s note shouldn’t be required to justify absences, the CDC said Aug. 26 in its guidelines for higher education.

One of the ads the CDC is considering is aimed at college students who don’t want to miss the events that make college exciting, said Sheedy who recounted the video. It starts with a student answering a knock on her dorm-room door.

Targeted Advertisements

“Hi, it’s H1N1 flu, and I’m here to ruin everything,” says the unexpected visitor in the video. “You know that date you had planned for Saturday night? Ruined! You know that trip you were going to take? Ruined!”

“It’s really cute,” said Sheedy. “If something cute or cutting-edge is what it takes to get their attention, then that’s what we’ll do.”

Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, had 25 players on its football team sick this month. It has reserved an off- campus apartment building with about 30 beds to house students at higher-risk for being harmed by flu, spokesman Michael Schoenfeld said. Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, is keeping as many as three residence halls empty this fall to isolate swine flu patients, with capacity for 75 students.

‘Flu Bus’

The University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, started a “flu bus” to transport sick students from residence halls to health services. With a large campus, the university wants to avoid infections spreading on public transportation, said Robert Winfield, Michigan’s chief health officer and director of the university health service.

The University of Arizona in Tucson is planning a drive- through clinic for flu shots later in September, spokesman Johnny Cruz said. The campus has seen 25 cases in the few weeks since students returned.

“You can just pull up, get your shot and keep going,” he said in a telephone interview. “This is a way to do it faster and to limit interactions among people that might be ill.”

Testing Stopped

Most campuses have stopped testing students for H1N1 and instead are tracking the number of students showing flu-like symptoms. The CDC continues to sample patients at designated hospitals and doctors offices to track the size and location of outbreaks.

“We continue to see cases in the student health center every day,” said Cathy Andreen, a spokeswoman for the University of Alabama. “We had seen about 50 last Friday (Aug. 21), but I don’t have a running total.”

Students up to age 24 are one of five targeted groups to get the vaccines, the CDC said. The others are health-care workers, pregnant women, adults with underlying health conditions and parents and caretakers of infants under age 6. Symptoms in most cases are similar to normal flu, though an unusual number of young people are ending up in hospitals with severe cases.

Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, has been treating sick patients with antiviral medicines and delivering meals to dorm rooms for students who live on campus, Lisa Albert, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.

“The students have been truly responsive,” Kansas’s Cohen said. “They want to stay healthy. They’re excited they’re on campus.”

“We don’t have the flu police going around saying, ‘hey look, you’ve got a sniffle, you should be getting out of here,’” said Arizona State’s Markus. “When you have 65,000 students, you have to get the information out there and ask the students to do the right thing.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net; Meg Tirrell in New York at mtirrell@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: August 31, 2009 16:17 EDT