Posted: 15 June 2009 0508 hrs
A student has her temperature taken at a clinic in Melbourne, Australia.
SYDNEY: Australia prepared to ratchet up its A(H1N1) flu alert on Sunday and Saudi Arabia made plans to guard against the pandemic's spread during pilgrimages to Muslim holy sites as cases worldwide neared 30,000.
Three days after the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic, Saudi junior health minister Khalid al-Zahrani said the ministry was shoring up health care services and monitoring for the disease.
But the kingdom would not restrict entry to pilgrims because of the threat, the official SPA news agency reported.
As well as the annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, which all Muslims are required to make once in a lifetime if they can, the faithful can also make a lesser pilgrimage to the holy places, known as omra, at any time of the year.
Saudi Arabia reported three new A(H1N1) flu cases on Sunday: a Mauritanian arriving from Canada and a Saudi brother and sister, taking to 12 the number of cases since the virus first appeared in the kingdom 11 days ago.
In Australia, Health Minister Nicola Roxon said that with the national tally nearing 1,500 cases, the whole country would soon move to the "sustain" phase in line with hotspot state Victoria.
This phase, Australia's second-highest, gives authorities the power to cancel sports events, close schools and restrict travel, although officials say extreme measures such as closing national borders are unlikely.
The World Health Organisation raised its global alert to a maximum six on Thursday, saying A(H1N1) flu had reached pandemic status because of its geographical spread.
A(H1N1) flu has so far infected almost 30,000 people in 74 countries and claimed 145 lives since it was first detected in Mexico in April, according to the latest WHO figures released on Friday.
A total of 1,458 cases of the A(H1N1) virus have been counted in Australia, the worst-hit Asia-Pacific country, with the fifth highest number of cases worldwide.
"As the numbers gradually increase in jurisdictions there will be steps over the coming days to move to a consistent alert level," Roxon said.
Meanwhile, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva urged the country not to panic after health authorities reported 150 confirmed cases of the virus on Sunday - almost 10 times the tally just three days earlier.
"People should not panic. The death ratio for the new flu is probably lower than normal flu," Abhisit said.
France meanwhile reported a further two cases of the disease on Sunday after 11 school children were hospitalised following a suspected outbreak near Toulouse, in the southwest.
The 11 pupils, aged around 11, were admitted to hospital with suspected A(H1N1) infections.
It is in the southern hemisphere that the need for a vaccine is more urgent, as countries there are heading into winter and the height of their flu season.
Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis on Friday stole a march on competitors by announcing it had completed a first batch of its vaccine for pre-clinical trials.
A spokesman told AFP it hoped to have a vaccine in production by September or October.
Novartis said it hoped to start trials on patients in July and to gain a licence soon after. It said more than 30 governments had already asked for A(H1N1) virus "vaccine ingredients."
The US government gave Novartis 289 million dollars (205 million euros) to help develop a vaccine. It also placed an order with Sanofi-Pasteur of France, which said it hoped to have doses ready for clinical trials in coming weeks.
British-controlled GlaxoSmithKline said it could produce a vaccine in four to six months and that it was ready to convert a donation of 50 million doses of vaccine against H5N1 bird flu for the WHO to A(H1N1) flu doses. - AFP/de
From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.
Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 19-May-2009 02:53 hrs
Muslim pilgrims attend sunset prayers at the Prophet Mohammed Mosque in the Saudi holy city of Medina in 2008. Flu experts are casting a worried eye at the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, fearing that if swine influenza poses a threat six months from now, a health crisis would be massively complicated by the Hajj.
Flu experts are casting a worried eye at the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, fearing that if swine influenza poses a threat six months from now, a health crisis would be massively complicated by the Hajj.
Specialists questioned at a major medical conference in Helsinki shuddered at the implications if a highly contagious, novel flu virus were unleashed at the world's biggest annual gathering.
In the grimmest scenarios, the pathogen would not only find easy pickings among the elderly, the weak and sick in Mecca -- it would also hitch a plane ride among pilgrims returning home and thus spread farther.
"Just imagine, you have a virus that starts to spread over the world, then you bring people together from all over the world, put them all together for a couple of weeks, then you take them out again," said Albert Osterhaus, a professor at the Erasmus Medical Centre at the University of Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
"If there's a mechanism by which you want to spread a virus, this is it."
Last December, an estimated two and a half million worshippers travelled to Islam's holiest site for the three-day fulfilment of their faith. This year's pilgrimage takes place November 25-28.
In interviews with AFP at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), Osterhaus and other specialists cautioned against alarmism, but urged Hajj organisers to start formulating response plans.
"The Hajj will take place, it's not like one of those things which is like a Pink Floyd concert, and you say, 'we don't need the concert'. This event will go through, that's for sure," said Andreas Voess, professor of Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands.
"I believe that the health authorities there, with the help of the WHO and others, would need to look at what do we do, what do we advise people... they have to be prepared and they have to start thinking about what to do now and not when they have got the first pilgrimage victim with influenza."
He added: "It is something that has to be looked at, it really does."
Since influenza (A)H1N1 swine flu leapt into the spotlight on April 24, nearly 8,500 people have fallen sick, according to the UN's World Health Organisation (WHO).
After originating in Mexico, it has swept into at least 39 countries and the WHO describes a pandemic as "imminent."
At present, the viral strain is considered relatively mild.
Even though it is a new genetic mix to which people do not appear to have immunity, it is roughly as contagious and virulent as normal (also called "seasonal") flu, which breaks out every year in slightly different strains and kills between quarter of a million and half a million people annually.
What will happen to the new virus in the coming months is the big unknown, creating a dilemma for watchdogs hoping to protect the Hajj.
"We cannot predict what will happen by that time, it might be striking, it might not, it might fade away," Osterhaus said.
One of Europe's top virologists, Osterhaus pointed to three ways the virus could go.
It could be ousted in the battle for Darwinian supremacy by the seasonal virus.
Or it could spread, developing into a pandemic that, by the standards of past killer flus, would be low-level. He drew a parallel with a 1957-58 pandemic that killed between one and four million people.
For pilgrims, the question is whether a pandemic vaccine will be available in time -- and in sufficient quantities -- to innoculate them.
The third, most frightening, scenario is that H1N1 could pick up genes by reassorting with other flu viruses, making it both more lethal as well as highly contagious. The nightmare benchmark for this is another H1N1 strain that in 1918-19 killed around 50 million people through "Spanish flu."
Pentti Huovinen, a professor of clinical microbiology at Finland's National Public Health Institute, said the challenge was to balance "the importance of religion and the threat of the disease."
"That's a question that we cannot answer very easily," he said. — AFP
From TODAY; Tuesday, 19-May-2009
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Can you build an internal resistance to swine flu?
A student has her temperature taken at a clinic in Melbourne, Australia.
