Texas swine flu death
first outside Mexico
By Maggie Fox
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A baby in
Texas has died of the H1N1 flu strain, the first confirmed death
outside Mexico from a virus which health officials fear could cause
a pandemic as it spread to two more countries in Europe.
Nearly a week after the threat
emerged in Mexico, where up to 159 people have died, a U.S.
official said on Wednesday a 23-month-old had died in the state
bordering Mexico. A health official said the baby was Mexican and
was in the United States for medical treatment.
Richard Besser, acting head of the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he expected
more bad news even though most of the 65 U.S. cases of swine flu
were mild.
"We're going to find more cases.
We're going to find more severe cases and I expect that we'll
continue to see additional deaths," he said.
President Barack Obama said the
death showed it was time to take "utmost precautions" against the
possible spread of the virus.
Germany reported its first three
infections and Austria one, taking to nine the number of countries
known to be affected.
"We have about 100 cases outside
Mexico, and now you have one death. That is very significant," said
Lo Wing Lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong.
TOURISM HIT
France said it would seek on
Thursday a European Union ban on flights to Mexico because of the
influenza outbreak. Argentina and Cuba have already banned
them.
The EU, the United States and
Canada have advised against non-essential travel to the popular
tourist destination.
Like the baby in the United
States, all seven new cases in Europe had recently been in
Mexico.
They comprised a Bavarian couple
in their 30s, a 22-year-old woman from Hamburg, a 28-year-old
Austrian, who was now recovering, and three Britons with mild
symptoms -- adults in London and Birmingham and a girl aged 12 in
southwest England.
Cases have been confirmed in
Canada, New Zealand, Israel and Spain.
The World Health Organisation said
it might raise its pandemic alert level to phase five -- the second
highest -- if it were confirmed that infected people in at least
two countries were spreading the disease to other people in a
sustained way.
Before the U.S. death was
reported, Keiji Fukuda, acting WHO assistant director for health
security and environment, said it could be a "very mild pandemic,"
adding, however, that influenza "moves in ways we cannot
predict."
H1N1 swine flu poses the biggest
risk of a large-scale pandemic since avian flu re-emerged in 2003,
killing 257 people of 421 infected in 15 countries. In 1968 a "Hong
Kong" flu pandemic killed about 1 million people globally, with
twice that number dying a decade earlier.
Stock markets in Asia and Europe
rose on Wednesday, partly on optimism the world could be spared a
deadly pandemic. However, considerable market uncertainty
remained.
The new strain contains DNA from
avian, swine and human viruses and appears to have evolved the
ability to pass easily from one person to another, unlike most
swine H1N1 viruses. It cannot be caught from eating pig meat
products but Egypt ordered all its pigs to be slaughtered and some
countries, led by Russia and China, have banned U.S. pork
imports.
The World Trade Organisation said
on Wednesday it had not been told officially of any such bans, and
the EU and Japan said they would not follow suit.
DIFFERENT PATTERN
Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel
Cordova said more than 1,300 people were in hospitals, some of them
seriously ill, out of a total of about 2,500 suspected
cases.
"In the last few days there has
been a decline (in cases)," he said. "The death figures have
remained more or less stable."
Victims included young adults, a
different pattern from common seasonal flu that mainly kills the
elderly and infirm. It kills 250,000 to 500,000 people in a normal
year, including healthy children in rich countries.
Health agencies advise frequent
hand-washing and covering sneezes and coughs to help stop the
spread. Experts generally agree that face masks, especially the
surgical masks seen on the streets of Mexico City, offer little
protection.
The outbreak has deeply affected
life in Mexico and ravaged tourism, a key earner.
Mexico City was unusually quiet,
with schools closed. Many parents took their children in to
work.
All Mayan ruins and Aztec
pyramids, dotted through central and southern Mexico, were closed
until further notice.
Cruise firms Carnival and Royal
Caribbean said they were temporarily suspending port calls in the
country and land-based tour groups were calling off
trips.
In a sign of how mild many cases
outside Mexico have been, New Zealand gave the all-clear for a
group of students and a teacher who caught the virus.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack said pork, soybean and corn prices had fallen in the past
two days and criticised what he said were illogical trade
restrictions on pork.
"We want to make sure that a
handful of our trading partners don't take advantage of this
legitimate concern over public health and engage in behaviour that
could also damage the world's economy," said U.S. Trade
Representative Ron Kirk.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox, Doina
Chiacu and Will Dunham in Washington, Jason Lange, Catherine Bremer
Alistair Bell and Helen Popper in Mexico City, Eric Burroughs and
Tan Ee Lyn in Hong Kong; Writing by Richard Meares, editing by
Andrew Dobbie)
