Teenagers From Queens in Swine Flu Spotlight

Lamonaca and her friends spent five months planning a trip to Mexico to celebrate their senior year of high school. They chose the Oasis Cancun, better known for college partying than high school vacations (“The center of spring break action,” raves one student travel Web site). Ms. Lamonaca persuaded her parents to let her go if she paid her own way — so she worked every day after school to save up about $1,200.

Ms. Lamonaca said the trip was “awesome.”

But now, less than a week after flying home, Ms. Lamonaca is discombobulated to find herself and her friends under a national — if not global — spotlight, as health officials scramble to figure out whether the teenagers were the unwitting vector that brought swine flu to New York City.

Amid worries that the new flu strain, which has killed 149 people and sickened more than 1,600 in Mexico, could become a global pandemic, 45 cases have been confirmed in the United States — 28 of them among students at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens, where Ms. Lamonaca and 7 of the 11 friends she vacationed with are students. The outbreak in New York is so far confined to the cluster at St. Francis, health officials say.

But officials caution that they are not sure yet whether the vacationers, who returned to school on April 20 after the six-day trip, caused the outbreak. A questionnaire distributed to students at St. Francis asked about travel to Mexico, but also to California and Texas. And Ms. Lamonaca said it was not fair to blame her and her friends.

“No one can prove it,” said Ms. Lamonaca, who came to the door of her family’s house in Forest Hills, Queens, on Monday, in a gray tank top, athletic shorts and a surgical mask.

Her parents, she said, had ordered her not to take off the mask until her symptoms went away. They made a “quarantine” sign to hang on the doorknob of her bedroom, she added.

Ms. Lamonaca said she began to feel ill last Wednesday, with a sore throat, aching back and a cough, but was now feeling better. She said she had not been tested for the swine flu.

Her only fear about Mexico, she said, had been the drug wars that have torn apart parts of the country. But she and her friends stuck to tourist areas and saw no problems, she said.

Now, though, ripples of fear over the flu have spread throughout Queens, where parents send their children from across the borough to attend St. Francis.

Meanwhile, Ms. Lamonaca, who said she would probably study business administration at Hunter College in the fall, was stuck inside on a beautiful day, as the sun glowed through the rows of cherry trees on her street.

“I kind of just want school to be over already,” she said. “This is not helping.”

She said that most of her friends on the trip had not gotten seriously ill. With school closed Monday because of the outbreak, she said, her friend had gone to the beach.