The Wisconsin football team has had at least 10 players affected this week by flu-like symptoms, UW officials announced Tuesday.

According to Dennis Helwig, assistant athletic director for sports medicine, the first case within the football team developed Sunday, with more being reported Monday and Tuesday as well.

As a result, head coach Bret Bielema and sports medicine officials have followed several precautionary measures to prevent the symptoms from spreading, including keeping the players from speaking to the media as previously scheduled.

“As you know, we’ve been preparing for this for quite some time,” Helwig said. “We’ve had some incidents, and we’ve dealt with them according to the guidelines established by the university.”

Helwig also noted such an occurrence is not uncommon at this time of year when classes at the university resume for the fall.

“We felt it was coming because of everybody coming back to school,” he said. “That’s when we usually see an outbreak of symptoms like this.”

Despite the setback of having several players limited in practice or missing it altogether, Bielema remains positive his team will be ready for its game against Fresno State.

Bielema fully expects his players to be ready for Saturday’s game, though admits he is not sure how many players, if any, will be affected by the flu when game day rolls around.

“One of the things we say … it’s not so much what happens — it’s how you react to what happens,” Bielema said. “Today was a classic example, calling our team together. We started having some guys get sick on Sunday. … Monday it progressed and got a little worse. We had doctors address the team on Tuesday before practice and again afterwards.”

Team officials are not yet sure if any of the players with flu-like symptoms has contracted the H1N1 virus, but according to Craig Roberts, epidemiologist for UHS, university officials are treating anyone with flu-like symptoms as if it were H1N1.

“At this point, on this campus, we would make the assumption that anyone with an influenza-like illness would have swine flu,” Roberts said.

The football team is not the first team to be affected by flu-like symptoms this fall and likely will not be the last. Among the most heavily affected by the outbreak have been the men’s and women’s swimming teams, which have opted to suspend practices.

“Anytime you have players that are that close to one another and things like that you expect that you’re going to have it transfer one to another,” Helwig said. “It’s touch contact. Our wrestling team would be highly susceptible, and football players [are] certainly different than you would see maybe with tennis or an individual sport like that.”

Helwig also noted the severity of the symptoms varies from one case to another, but they have had athletes with fevers of more than 100 degrees, sore throats and body aches.

Among the players noted by Bielema who have developed the symptoms are offensive lineman Gabe Carimi and defensive lineman Brendan Kelly, both of whom have been working to return from injuries. Still, there has not been a distinct pattern associating the players who have developed the symptoms.

“The guys on Sunday, when they first came to me, it was kind of our dorm guys,” Bielema said. “Then some older players started coming down with some symptoms yesterday, and now it’s kind of a hodgepodge of everything.”

The biggest effect of the flu outbreak for the football team has been an inability to practice in the team’s typical manner. On a normal Tuesday, the Badgers would have their toughest workload of the week.

However, with several players whose stamina may not be 100 percent because they are recovering from the flu or beginning to develop flu-like symptoms, Bielema and his coaching staff decided to limit the extent of the team’s practice Tuesday.

“As coaches we gotta be smart about what we’re doing,” Bielema said.

Fortunately for the Wisconsin head coach and his staff, the problem seems to be isolated among the players, with no members of the coaching or support staff having reported being affected. Bielema did, however, sound a bit hoarse Tuesday when speaking with the media.

“I feel pretty good,” he said. “My voice started to go earlier today. I’m hoping it’s because I’ve been yelling and screaming, but I haven’t been screaming a lot.”