A seventy-year-old woman from New York has died of the A/H1N1 flu virus in Las Vegas area, local health officials said on Friday.

The woman was in Clark County, Nevada to visit family, according to the officials, who believe she had underlying medical conditions and died from complications with the A/H1N1 flu.

“It is sobering that a patient has died from this influenza strain,” Dr. Lawrence Sands, chief health officer of the Southern Nevada Health District, said in a news release.

She was the first death from A/H1N1 flu in the state of Nevada, but the 17th New Yorker who died of the virus since the outbreak of A/H1N1 flu in late April.

Earlier Friday, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a total of 45 deaths of the virus in 13 states, of which the state of New York tops the list with 13 deaths.

The CDC's death toll apparently has not included the New York old woman who died in Nevada nor three young New yorkers who died in New York City on Thursday.

The three deaths reported by the city health officials on Thursday involved an 11-year-old Brooklyn girl who was a student at the Urban Assembly School for Criminal Justice.

The other two included a child younger than two years old and a person older than 30, the health department said.

On Friday, New York state health department also reported 1,356 confirmed cases of A/H1N1 flu, including 863 in the city and 493 in the state.

In the past week, the death toll of the flu has more than doubled from 8 to 17 in the state of New York, while the total number of confirmed cases has jumped from 858 to 1,356, increasing nearly 60 percent.

The city and state officials estimate that the A/H1N1 flu has been spreading rapidly, affecting more than half a million people in the city, even more in the state.

(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2009)