Maine officials were working furiously Friday as swine flu continued to spread around the country.

In the past few days, the state lab in Augusta was averaging 100 flu tests per day, up from five on Monday. By Friday night, the number of confirmed cases in Maine was up to six, according to the governor’s office.

The tally included two adults in Kennebec County, two adults and one youth in York County and one youth in Penobscot County. All are recovering, said David Farmer, a spokesman for Gov. John Baldacci.

One of two youths in York County described early this week as suspicious cases did not test positive for the H1N1 virus, Farmer said.

The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention is fielding 300 calls a day from doctors and other service providers and 100 calls a day from the public.

And with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control continuously issuing new guidelines on the flu, the head of Maine’s CDC, Dora Anne Mills, is working constantly – including daily conference calls, sometimes with hundreds of people at a time looking for information.

“Dora is working just about around the clock – Dora and her top people,” Farmer said. “I get e-mails from her, the phone is buzzing or e-mail is buzzing, all through the night. To the point where I’m saying, ‘Go to bed.'”

The furious pace is not likely to slow any time soon. In fact, Farmer said, “I suspect it will speed up.”

Additional work could come as soon as this weekend. The state is set to get 50,000 courses of anti-viral medication in the next couple of days, and the state CDC will oversee its distribution to hospitals.

To help deal with the swine flu, the CDC has just gotten the OK to hire a pandemic flu coordinator. The position had been vacant.

The CDC has pulled some workers from other positions to help deal with flu work, and it has asked several recent retirees to come back to the Office of Public Health Preparedness.

Some critics have said the flu has been hyped and the response to it has gone overboard. Mills disagrees.

She calls the virus “novel” and “unique” and said health officials believe most people don’t have immunity to it. That makes it potentially dangerous.

“We’re not taking any chances,” Mills said during a conference call with reporters on Friday. “If this is like a blizzard bearing down on us and it suddenly goes out to sea, I would be extremely happy. I would love to be sitting here in a few weeks and saying, ‘Wow. We missed the big one.’ But I don’t think we can take a chance.”