As of Wednesday afternoon, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention had in 10 states. One death in Texas -- a 23-month-old child from Mexico -- has been attributed to the flu, and health officials expect more deaths to follow.

The swiftness with which the Swine Flu has spread -- and the speed with which new electronic health surveillance systems have tracked its emergence -- is prompting companies to quickly dust off business continuity plans and warn workers to guard their health.

"Businesses need to take this serious and put plans in place for personnel," said Michael Croy, director of business continuity solutions at Forsythe Solutions Group Inc., an IT consulting firm in Skokie, Ill. "They need to make sure employees can work from home. They need to tell them about how to take care of their health and be overly cautious by telling workers to stay home if they feel sick. But they also need to do it in way so as not to create panic."

The best antidote for panic is information, and disease surveillance systems rolled out in recent years are allowing health agencies to track, report and confirm Swine Flu cases faster than ever. But gaps in the system remain, health care experts said.

While today's electronic reporting systems are vastly more sophisticated than the paper-based methods used as recently as 10 years ago, many community hospitals and private physicians are still not equipped to correlate all the data coming from health providers, insurance companies and laboratories.