Houston Texans rookie tight end Anthony Hill was hospitalized this week with swine flu in the first confirmed case in an NFL player this season.
Hill is the only player on the team believed to have swine flu, and other players are being monitored, Texans vice president of communications Tony Wyllie said Friday.
Hill, a fourth-round draft pick from North Carolina State, spent two nights in the hospital and told KRIV-TV in Houston that he was released Friday morning.
"In the beginning, doctors thought it was pneumonia," Hill told the station. "It wasn't. Then (Thursday) results for swine flu came back, and it was positive. I was already taking medicine for both."
The Texans host the Oakland Raiders on Sunday.
The Texans are the first team to confirm that one of its players has swine flu, also called the H1N1 virus. Houston players receive shots for seasonal flu each year and already had received them this year.
Vaccines for the swine flu aren't expected to be available until later this month, and even then, there will only be a very limited amount of doses.
Texans coach Gary Kubiak said a few players felt ill Thursday, but they were OK by Friday.
"There's no panic at all," he said. "We handled it well as an organization (Thursday) evening and understood what was going on, got on top of anybody who wasn't feeling good (Thursday) evening and (Friday) we responded well. Everybody was fine."
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sent a memo to all 32 teams Friday explaining how rosters can be handled if the illness spreads. He told teams that if they have at least six players with confirmed cases of swine flu, they can replace them with as many as eight members of the practice squad on a roster exemption. Teams can add players up to four hours before kickoff.
In late August, Miami Dolphins defensive backs Sean Smith and Jason Allen were scratched from a preseason game because of flu-like symptoms, but the team declined to say whether the players were tested for swine flu. Smith and Allen declined comment.
The new swine flu seems no more deadly than regular winter flu, which every year kills 36,000 Americans and hospitalizes 200,000. This H1N1 strain sickens younger people more frequently than the over-65 population who are seasonal flu's main victims.
Flu-like symptoms have hit a number of college programs this season, including Wisconsin and Florida, which last month held a number of players out of practice. Florida had a round of flu shots about one week after a school official predicted that as many as 40 percent of students could catch swine flu this season.
The Texans are following the advice of medical advisers and don't have reason to believe that anyone else has the swine flu.
"I think we're obviously doing everything we're told to do from that standpoint," Kubiak said. "We're taking every precaution we can. The good news is ... we feel like it's very isolated and we're getting ready to go play a game."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
