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Friday, May 29, 2009

Global swine flu death toll mounts

Time is GMT + 8 hours
Posted: 30-May-2009 03:30 hrs

A security officer wears a mask inside the Sismanoglio hospital in Athens. Health authorities around the world battled Friday to stop the spread of swine flu with schools in Europe closed, while the death toll mounted in Mexico.

Health authorities around the world battled Friday to stop the spread of swine flu with schools in Europe closed, while the death toll mounted in Mexico.

Even US President Barack Obama's visit to France next week was touched by the epidemic when a US official preparing a visit to the Normandy beaches was stricken by the virus and put in isolation. China reported its first case of domestic infection.

Belgian health authorities closed a primary school in a Brussels suburb on Friday after a 10-year boy was found to have the A(H1N1) virus after a trip to the United States.

All pupils in the boy's class and their teachers received treatment, a statement by the government's flu committee said. "All families have been asked to remain at home and monitor the state of their children."

The Belgian action came only a day after the elite Eton private school in Britain, which has educated generations of British prime ministers and royals, was ordered to close for a week after a 13-year-old pupil was confirmed as a swine flu carrier.

Seventeen other new cases were confirmed in Britain, where a total of 203 people have now been infected.

The virus has now killed more than 110 people around the world, according to individual governments. The World Health Organisation said 13,398 people in 48 countries were now infected with hundreds of new cases reported each day.

Mexico's death toll rose by six to 95 on Thursday, while the number of infected cases rose to 4,879, the health ministry said. Venezuela and Paraguay were the latest countries to report cases.

China's health ministry confirmed the first case of swine flu involving a person infected inside the country.

The ministry said a 24-year-old woman in the southern province of Guangdong had been infected after contact with a virus carrier.

The woman works as a make-up artist at a photo studio in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, and came into contact with the sufferer who was having wedding photos taken at the studio, it said.

The health ministry said the virus carrier was a 28-year-old Chinese-American man employed at a hospital in New York, who had flown to Guangzhou on Sunday.

An American woman sent to France to prepare the US president's visit to D-Day landing beaches next week has been hospitalised with swine flu, French officials said Friday.

"Eleven people who were in close contact with her were given preventive treatment last night and confined to their hotel rooms for 24 hours," said Christian Leyrit, the state representative in the Normandy region.

Leyrit insisted there would be no impact on the D-Day commemorations involving Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on June 6. — AFP

From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

WHO needs time to evaluate H1N1 flu vaccine

English: Illustration of antigenic shift (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

CNA – World News

GENEVA: Scientists need more time to decide whether to mass produce a vaccine against H1N1 flu, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday, as the number of cases topped 6,000 around the globe.

Acting assistant WHO director-general Keiji Fukuda told journalists that a meeting of experts came to "no big decisions" on Thursday on whether to begin producing a vaccine to the Influenza A (H1N1) virus.

Production of vaccines against the new virus could disrupt the ongoing production of seasonal flu vaccines, he added.

Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO director for vaccine research, said last week that Thursday's meeting would decide whether to ask the UN agency to give the go-ahead for large-scale manufacturing of a vaccine.

But Fukuda said more meetings were needed to examine the technical process for manufacturers to ready themselves to go into mass production which will "require several weeks".

"It's not possible to say that there will be a decision by this date, really it's a painstaking and difficult process," said Fukuda.

The number of laboratory-confirmed H1N1 flu cases on Thursday topped 6,497 in 33 countries, with Belgium becoming the latest European nation to be hit. Peru also registered its first case.

A total of 65 people have died from the disease, most of them in Mexico.

Most of the confirmed cases of H1N1 flu have been in the United States where the number jumped on Thursday to 4,298 sufferers in 47 states including the District of Columbia, health authorities said.

New York officials also announced they were shutting down three schools in response to a H1N1 flu outbreak and that one staff member had been hospitalised in serious condition.

The three schools, with a total of about 4,500 students, will close on Friday and all next week in response to "an unusually high level of flu-like illnesses at those schools," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

So far only four states have been spared the virus – West Virginia, Mississippi, Wyoming and Alaska. But US health officials say they believe the new flu strain will eventually be reported in all 50 states.

Mexico, which has been the epicentre of the outbreak and now has 2,656 confirmed cases, has said it will seek compensation for the damages suffered after fears of the disease drove away thousands of tourists – a critical source of foreign revenue.

"There are grounds to apply for compensation ... for the country that has been hardest-hit" by the virus, Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told reporters.

Cordova said compensation for lost tourist revenue could come from the World Bank or the Inter-American Development Bank.

Belgium meanwhile reported a second case of H1N1 flu in the country, the day after announcing it had discovered its first infection.

The WHO also announced that it would shorten its world assembly scheduled to start on Monday in Geneva from nine to four days because of the outbreak.

China, meanwhile, stepped up a search for people who had come into contact with the mainland's two confirmed H1N1 flu patients.

Authorities in Beijing and eastern Shandong province were looking passengers who might have travelled with a 19-year-old student, who on Wednesday became the second confirmed sufferer on the mainland.

China, criticised for its handling of the SARS crisis six years ago, has reacted aggressively to prevent a major new flu outbreak in the world's most populous nation.

The youth apparently felt ill on Sunday, two days after landing in China from Canada, but nevertheless boarded a train on Monday for Shandong province with a fever, sore throat and a headache. Canada has so far the third largest number of H1N1 flu cases and one woman has died there.

Earlier, a 30-year-old man was confirmed to have the virus in the southwestern city of Chengdu. He had been in the United States, where three people have died of the disease, before coming home to China.

Two other cases have been confirmed in Hong Kong. Authorities there said they had quarantined six people who travelled with the second case, a 24-year-old man, by plane from San Francisco.

The cases in China and Hong Kong highlighted concerns that the virus – believed to be a mix of bird and human flu which came together in pigs – could spread further around the world as sufferers travelled by air.

- AFP/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; Posted: 15 May 2009 0925 hrs

Sunday, May 3, 2009

US flu tally jumps to 245 as labs catch up

By MALCOLM RITTER,AP Science Writer AP - 2 hours 59 minutes ago

NEW YORK - The tally of confirmed swine flu cases in the United States jumped Sunday to 245 in 35 states, but officials said that's largely from catching up on a backlog of lab tests rather than a sudden spurt in new infections.

The new count reflects streamlining in federal procedures and the results of tests by states, which have only recently begun confirming cases, said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Because states are now contributing their results, and because there are many cases to analyze, "I expect the numbers to jump quite a bit in the next couple days," she told reporters Sunday.

Beyond eating into the backlog, the new number also reflects that "we do think this virus is fairly widespread," she said.

"Virtually all of the United States probably has this virus circulating now. That doesn't mean that everybody's infected, but within the communities, the virus has arrived."

Early Sunday, the CDC updated its number to 226 cases in 30 states, up from 160 in 21 states. Later, five more states reported confirmed cases, and new illnesses elsewhere were added to the tally.

Mexico's health secretary said Sunday that his country's outbreak is "now in its declining phase," but Schuchat noted that the United States got off to a later start. "We believe we are just in the upswing here," she said.

Scientists are still gathering information on how severe the nation's 30 hospitalized cases are, she said. They are mostly older children and young adults, in contrast to ordinary flu, which tends to send the elderly and very young to the hospital, Schuchat said.

The only swine flu death in the U.S. is that of a Mexican toddler who was visiting Texas.

Local authorities announced more school closings Sunday, including all 24 schools in a district west of Detroit after a high school student came down with an apparent case of the illness.

On Sunday's talk shows, U.S. health officials said they were cautiously optimistic that the swine flu isn't as dangerous as first feared, but urged people to keep taking commonsense precautions. They said they can't predict if the virus will roar back in the fall.

"The good news is when we look at this virus right now, we're not seeing some of the things in the virus that have been associated in the past with more severe flu. That's encouraging, but it doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet," said Dr. Richard Besser, acting CDC chief.

With swine flu, or the H1N1 flu as the government prefers to call it, now in more than 30 states and counting, authorities say it's spreading just as easily as regular winter flu. But, as Besser appeared on talk shows with the president's health and homeland security chiefs, they said that it doesn't seem to cause as severe a disease as it did in Mexico.

A big concern is whether the virus will return, perhaps harder, when regular influenza begins its march here. Flu season in the Southern Hemisphere is about to begin, and U.S. authorities will watch how the swine flu circulates there over the coming months as they prepare the first vaccine and then decide whether to order that large amounts of it be produced in the fall.

Production of regular winter flu vaccine is going full-tilt, "to make sure we kind of clear the decks," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said.

"We are testing the virus strain for H1N1 virus so that we're ready to go into production later, in a month or two, when we make sure that we have the right dosage and the right tests. So we'll be ready for both," she said.

Even if the swine virus doesn't prove as potent as authorities first feared, Besser said that doesn't mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.

With a new infectious disease, "you basically get one shot, you get one chance to try to reduce the impact," Besser said. "You take a very aggressive approach and as you learn more information you can tailor your response."

It was just over a week ago that authorities learned the new flu CDC had detected in a few people in California and Texas was causing a large outbreak and deaths in Mexico, triggering global alarm.

"We didn't know what its lethality was going to be. We had to move. Once you get behind flu, you can't catch up," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said.

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AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.

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From Yahoo! News; source article is here.