Fighting Deadly Flu, Mexico Cancels More Events(WHO to Raise Alert From 3 to 4)

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Source: NY Times

MEXICO CITY — Alarmed Mexican officials, scrambling to control a swine flu outbreak that has killed as many as 68 people and infected possibly 1,000 more in recent weeks, canceled more public events Saturday in and around the capital and said they were considering keeping schools for millions of students here closed into next week.

Officials also announced that two soccer matches scheduled for Sunday would be played without spectators, and hundreds of cultural events have been canceled.

The Associated Press reported Saturday that 24 new suspected cases of the flu were reported.

Mexico’s health minister, José Ángel Córdova, has said the country is dealing with a new flu virus that constitutes a respiratory epidemic that is so far controllable. He said the virus had mutated from pigs and had at some point been transmitted to humans.

The new strain contains gene sequences from North American and Eurasian swine flus, North American bird flu and North American human flu, said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A similar virus has been found in the American Southwest, where officials have reported eight nonfatal cases.

Most of Mexico’s dead were young, healthy adults, and none were over 60 or under 3 years old, the World Health Organization said. That alarms health officials because seasonal flus cause most of their deaths among infants and bedridden elderly people, but pandemic flus — like the 1918 Spanish flu, and the 1957 and 1968 pandemics — often strike young, healthy people the hardest.

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Because of the situation, the World Health Organization planned to consider raising the world pandemic flu alert to 4 from 3. Such a high level of alert — meaning that sustained human-to-human transmission of a new virus has been detected — has not been reached in recent years, even with the H5N1 avian flu circulating in Asia and Egypt, and would “really raise the hackles of everyone around the world,” said Dr. Robert G. Webster, a flu virus expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

Mexico’s flu season is usually over by now, but health officials have noticed a significant spike in flu cases since mid-March. The W.H.O. said there had been 800 cases in Mexico in recent weeks, 60 of them fatal, of a flulike illness that appeared to be more serious than the regular seasonal flu. Mr. Córdova said Friday that there were 1,004 possible cases.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/world/americas/26mexico.html?ref=world