The swine flu scare spread on Monday in California as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said the state is prepared for an outbreak and health experts expect the number of infected cases to rise.

An eighth case of swine flu was reported on Monday morning in California. Health officials in Sacramento, the state capital, said that swine flu had been confirmed in a seventh-grader at a local middle school.

The new case in California was among the 21 new cases of swine flue confirmed overnight in the United States, with the 20 other cases in New York.

However, all the new cases were mild, and there has still been only one hospitalization in the country, that of a woman in California who has since recovered, health officials said.

Schwarzenegger told a press conference here that state officials have activated the joint emergency operations center, a collaborative effort involving the state public health department and the California Emergency Management Agency.

"The bottom line is that we are prepared," said the governor while attending a conference on the global financial crisis in Beverly Hills.

According to Mark Horton, director of the California Department of Public Health at the press conference, about one-fourth of the federal stockpile of 5 million courses of vaccines targeting the disease have been sent to Sacramento for possible distribution to local jurisdictions if needed.

Meanwhile, parents of children at a Los Angeles suburb school picked up their kids on Monday morning after hearing that one of their classmates was being tested for swine flu, local television channel NBC4 reported.

In Los Angeles, public health officials were taking a number of measures to guard against the spread of the potentially deadly disease.

Workers at Los Angeles International Airport, which has 45 daily flights from Mexico, were reportedly disinfecting restrooms and taking other measures to try to stop the possible spread of swine flu, which is suspected in the deaths of 149 people in Mexico.

Swine flu is usually transmitted to humans by pigs, but health officials said they were concerned about the possibility of a pandemic because the new strain appears to be spreading from human to human.

The United States announced a nationwide health emergency on Sunday after about 40 confirmed cases of swine flu were reported across the country.