By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer Mark Stevenson, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 38 mins ago
MEXICO CITY – Mexico's president assumed new powers Saturday to isolate people infected with a deadly swine flu strain as authorities struggled to contain an outbreak that world health officials warned could become a global epidemic.
New cases of swine flu were confirmed in Kansas and California and suspected in New York City. But officials said they didn't know whether the New York cases were the strain that now has killed up to 81 people in Mexico and likely sickened 1,324 since April 13, according to figures updated late Saturday by Mexico's health secretary.
Tests have confirmed swine flu as the cause of death in 20 of the cases.
Mexican soldiers and health workers patrolled airports and bus stations as they tried to corral people who may be infected with the swine flu, as it became clearer that the government may have been slow to respond to the outbreak in March and early April.
Now, even detaining the ill may not keep the strain — a combination of swine, bird and human influenza that people may have no natural immunity to — from spreading, epidemiologists say.
The World Health Organization on Saturday asked countries around the world to step up reporting and surveillance of the disease and implement a coordinated response to contain it.
Two dozen new suspected cases were reported in Mexico City alone, where authorities suspended schools and all public events until further notice. More than 500 events, including concerts and sports games, were canceled in the metropolis of 20 million.
Mexican authorities ordered schools closed in the capital and the states of Mexico and San Luis Potosi until May 6, and the Roman Catholic Church announced the cancellation of Sunday masses in the capital.
The Mexican government issued a decree authorizing President Felipe Calderon to invoke special powers letting the Health Department isolate patients and inspect homes, incoming travelers and baggage. But officials said it was designed to free health workers from possible legal reprisals and to speed disease control efforts.
A team from the Centers for Disease Control had arrived in Mexico to help set up detection testing for the swine flu strain, something Mexico previously lacked.
The U.S. Embassy said the U.S. has not imposed travel constraints to and from Mexico but is suspending the processing of visas and other services through Wednesday to avoid creating crowds.
It issued an earlier message advising U.S. citizens to avoid large crowds, shaking hands, greeting people with a kiss or using the subway.
While suspected swine flu cases have been reported in about 16 Mexican states, Health Secretary Jose Cordova said "it has not spread to the entire country."
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the outbreak of the never-before-seen virus has "pandemic potential." But she said it is still too early to tell if it would become a pandemic.
WHO lays out three criteria necessary for a global epidemic: The virus is able to infect people, can readily spread person-to-person and the global population has no immunity to it.
Early detection and treatment are key to stopping any outbreak. WHO guidance calls for isolating the sick and blanketing everyone around them with anti-viral drugs such as Tamiflu.
Now, with patients showing up all across Mexico and its teeming capital, simple math suggests that kind of response is impossible.
Mexico appears to have lost valuable days or weeks in detecting the new virus.
Health authorities started noticing a threefold spike in flu cases in late March and early April, but they thought it was a late rebound in the December-February flu season.
Testing at domestic labs did not alert doctors to the new strain, and Cordova acknowledged Mexican labs lacked the necessary profiling data to detect the previously unknown strain.
The first death occurred in southern Oaxaca state on April 13, but Mexico didn't send the first of 14 mucous samples to the CDC until April 18, around the same time it dispatched health teams to hospitals looking for patients with severe flu or pnuemonia-like symptoms.
Those teams noticed something strange: The flu was killing people aged 20 to 40. Flu victims are usually either infants or the elderly. The Spanish flu pandemic, which killed at least 40 million people worldwide in 1918-19, also first struck otherwise healthy young adults.
Even though U.S. labs detected the swine flu in California and Texas before last weekend, Mexican authorities as recently as Wednesday were referring to it as a late-season flu.
But mid-afternoon Thursday, Mexico City Health Secretary Dr. Armando Ahued said, officials got a call "from the United States and Canada, the most important laboratories in the field, telling us this was a new virus."
"That was what led us to realize it wasn't a seasonal virus ... and take more serious preventative measures," Cordova said.
Asked why there were so many deaths in Mexico, and none so far among the 11 cases in the United States, Cordova noted that the U.S. cases involved children — who haven't been among the fatal cases in Mexico, either.
"There are immune factors that are giving children some sort of defense, that is the only explanation we have," he said.
Another factor may be that some Mexican patients may have delayed seeking medical help too long, Cordova said.
Some Mexicans suspected the government had been less than forthcoming. "They always make a big deal about good things that happen, but they really try to hide anything bad," Mexico City paralegal Gilberto Martinez said.
Airports around the world were screening travelers from Mexico for flu symptoms. But containing the disease may not be an option.
"Anything that would be about containing it right now would purely be a political move," said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota pandemic expert.
Scientists have warned for years about the potential for a pandemic from viruses that mix genetic material from humans and animals.
This swine flu and regular flu can have similar symptoms — mostly fever, cough and sore throat, though some of the U.S. victims who recovered also experienced vomiting and diarrhea. But unlike with regular flu, humans don't have natural immunity to a virus that includes animal genes — and new vaccines can take months to bring into use.
A "seed stock" genetically matched to the new swine flu virus has been created by the CDC, said Dr. Richard Besser, the agency's acting director. If the government decides vaccine production is necessary, manufacturers would need that stock to get started.
Mexican authorities did lay to rest one persistent doubt, after Mexican museum director Felipe Solis died this week, just days after accompanying U.S. President Barack Obama on a tour of National Anthropology Museum on April 16. Cordova said Solis had a pre-existing illness and died of pneumonia unrelated to influenza.
___
Associated Press Writers David Koop in Mexico City; Frank Jordans in Geneva; Mike Stobbe in Atlanta; Malcolm Ritter in New York; and Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Texas family quarantined after son contracts swine flu
Story Highlights
Texas teen is one of eight in U.S. diagnosed with swine flu
Teen's family ordered to stay away from public
Dozens in Mexico have died from same strain of swine flu found in U.S.
Officials say new strain has resisted some antiviral drugs
(CNN) -- As Hayden Henshaw was being rushed to the doctor's office after becoming ill, his father heard that his son's classmates had been struck with the deadly swine flu virus like the one sweeping through Mexico.
Patrick Henshaw called his wife immediately to have Hayden checked for it. Later, they received the bad news.
Hayden had become the third confirmed case of swine flu at his Texas high school. It is a virus that has killed 68 people in Mexico and infected at least eight people in the United States.
Health officials arrived at the Henshaws' house Friday and drew blood from the whole family, then told them to stay inside and away from the public, Henshaw told CNN.
The whole family is quarantined indefinitely, according to CNN-affiliate KABB. Henshaw said his family was shocked when they got the news about their son.
"Stunned. My wife was having a panic attack," Henshaw told the affiliate.
U.S. health officials have expressed concern about U.S. cases of a swine flu virus that has similar characteristics to the fatal virus in Mexico.
More than 1,000 people have fallen ill in Mexico City in a short period of time, U.S. health experts said.
"This situation has been developing quickly," Richard Besser, acting director of the Atlanta, Georgia-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Friday. "This is something we are worried about."
Besser said all of the eight U.S. patients have recovered. Watch for more on the U.S. cases »
New York health officials said Friday they were testing about 75 students at a school in New York City for swine flu after the students exhibited flu-like symptoms this week.
A team of state health department doctors and staff went to the St. Francis Preparatory School in the borough of Queens on Thursday after the students reported cough, fever, sore throat, aches and pains.
Test results are expected as early as Saturday.
The new virus has genes from North American swine influenza, avian influenza, human influenza and a form of swine influenza normally found in Asia and Europe, said Nancy Cox, chief of the CDC's Influenza Division.
Swine flu is caused by a virus similar to a type of flu virus that infects people every year but is a strain typically found only in pigs -- or in people who have direct contact with pigs.
There have, however, been cases of person-to-person transmission of swine flu, the CDC said.
More to come....
Texas teen is one of eight in U.S. diagnosed with swine flu
Teen's family ordered to stay away from public
Dozens in Mexico have died from same strain of swine flu found in U.S.
Officials say new strain has resisted some antiviral drugs
(CNN) -- As Hayden Henshaw was being rushed to the doctor's office after becoming ill, his father heard that his son's classmates had been struck with the deadly swine flu virus like the one sweeping through Mexico.
Patrick Henshaw called his wife immediately to have Hayden checked for it. Later, they received the bad news.
Hayden had become the third confirmed case of swine flu at his Texas high school. It is a virus that has killed 68 people in Mexico and infected at least eight people in the United States.
Health officials arrived at the Henshaws' house Friday and drew blood from the whole family, then told them to stay inside and away from the public, Henshaw told CNN.
The whole family is quarantined indefinitely, according to CNN-affiliate KABB. Henshaw said his family was shocked when they got the news about their son.
"Stunned. My wife was having a panic attack," Henshaw told the affiliate.
U.S. health officials have expressed concern about U.S. cases of a swine flu virus that has similar characteristics to the fatal virus in Mexico.
More than 1,000 people have fallen ill in Mexico City in a short period of time, U.S. health experts said.
"This situation has been developing quickly," Richard Besser, acting director of the Atlanta, Georgia-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said Friday. "This is something we are worried about."
Besser said all of the eight U.S. patients have recovered. Watch for more on the U.S. cases »
New York health officials said Friday they were testing about 75 students at a school in New York City for swine flu after the students exhibited flu-like symptoms this week.
A team of state health department doctors and staff went to the St. Francis Preparatory School in the borough of Queens on Thursday after the students reported cough, fever, sore throat, aches and pains.
Test results are expected as early as Saturday.
The new virus has genes from North American swine influenza, avian influenza, human influenza and a form of swine influenza normally found in Asia and Europe, said Nancy Cox, chief of the CDC's Influenza Division.
Swine flu is caused by a virus similar to a type of flu virus that infects people every year but is a strain typically found only in pigs -- or in people who have direct contact with pigs.
There have, however, been cases of person-to-person transmission of swine flu, the CDC said.
More to come....
Swine Flu Epidemic Updates and Information
(CNN) -- A potentially deadly new strain of the swine flu virus cropped up in more places in the United States and Mexico on Saturday, in what the World Health Organization called "a public health emergency of international concern."
The most recent reports Saturday afternoon were of two confirmed cases of the virus in Kansas -- bringing the number of confirmed U.S. cases to 11.
Those joined nine confirmed cases in Texas and California and an apparent outbreak at a private school in New York City, where officials say eight children likely have the virus.
By Saturday night, health officials in Mexico said 81 deaths there were "likely linked" to the swine flu.
Dr. Jose A. Cordova Villalobos, Mexico's Secretary of Health, said viral testing has confirmed 20 cases of swine flu across the country.
President Felipe Calderon on Saturday issued an executive decree detailing emergency powers of the Ministry of Health, according to the president's office.
The order gives the ministry with the authority to isolate sick patients, inspect travelers' luggage and their vehicles and conduct house inspections, the statement said.
The government also has the authority to prevent public gatherings, shut down public venues and regulate air, sea and overland travel.
The WHO's Gregory Hartl said the strain of the virus seen in Mexico is worrisome because it has mutated from older strains.
"Any time that there is a virus which changes ... it means perhaps the immunities the human body has built up to dealing with influenza might not be adjusted well enough to dealing with this new virus," Hartl told CNN.
In Mexico, otherwise young and healthy people have been hit by the virus -- "one of the pieces of the puzzle that is worrying us," he said.
Mexico City has closed all of its schools and universities because of the virus, and the country's National Health Council said all Saturday's soccer games would be played without public audiences. Watch an alarmed Mexico City react with face masks, cancellations »
WHO has sent experts to Mexico at the request of the country's government, Chan said.
All of the U.S. patients have recovered or are expected to. Two of the border cases were in Texas, near San Antonio, and seven of the cases were in southern California, the CDC said. Watch for more on the U.S. cases »
More than 1,300 people with flu-like symptoms have been admitted to hospitals in Mexico, and officials are trying to determine how many of those patients have swine flu, the country's health minister, Cordova said.
U.S. health officials said Friday that some cases of the virus matched samples of the deadly Mexican virus.
On Saturday, New York's Bureau of Communicable Diseases said preliminary tests from a Queens school suggest that eight out of the nine children tested probably have the swine flu virus.
Health Library
MayoClinic.com: Influenza (flu)
Dr. Don Weiss said up to 200 students at the school reported feeling ill.
He said the samples will be sent to the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, to determine the subtype of the strain. The results could be known as early as Sunday.
"What's concerning about this is, first, that it's likely swine flu; second is that at this time it is spreading from person to person," said New York City health Commissioner Thomas Frieden. Watch news conference with NYC health department spokesman »
When the flu spreads person to person, instead of from animals to humans, it can continue to mutate, making it a tougher strain that is harder to treat or fight off. Watch author John Barry discuss potential for a pandemic »
The infected people in Kansas are a man who had recently traveled to Mexico and his wife, officials said. Neither of them was hospitalized, said Dr. Jason Eberhart-Phillips, director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
The United States had not issued any travel warnings or quarantines by Saturday evening.
The Canadian Public Health Agency had issued a travel health notice, saying, "The Public Health Agency of Canada is tracking clusters of severe respiratory illness with deaths in Mexico." Watch CBC report on Canadian microbiologists' concerns »
Symptoms of swine flu include fever, lethargy, lack of appetite, coughing, runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, the CDC said.
Besser advised people with flu-like symptoms to stay home from work or school and to see a doctor
More information will be posted as I find it and as it comes in.
The most recent reports Saturday afternoon were of two confirmed cases of the virus in Kansas -- bringing the number of confirmed U.S. cases to 11.
Those joined nine confirmed cases in Texas and California and an apparent outbreak at a private school in New York City, where officials say eight children likely have the virus.
By Saturday night, health officials in Mexico said 81 deaths there were "likely linked" to the swine flu.
Dr. Jose A. Cordova Villalobos, Mexico's Secretary of Health, said viral testing has confirmed 20 cases of swine flu across the country.
President Felipe Calderon on Saturday issued an executive decree detailing emergency powers of the Ministry of Health, according to the president's office.
The order gives the ministry with the authority to isolate sick patients, inspect travelers' luggage and their vehicles and conduct house inspections, the statement said.
The government also has the authority to prevent public gatherings, shut down public venues and regulate air, sea and overland travel.
The WHO's Gregory Hartl said the strain of the virus seen in Mexico is worrisome because it has mutated from older strains.
"Any time that there is a virus which changes ... it means perhaps the immunities the human body has built up to dealing with influenza might not be adjusted well enough to dealing with this new virus," Hartl told CNN.
In Mexico, otherwise young and healthy people have been hit by the virus -- "one of the pieces of the puzzle that is worrying us," he said.
Mexico City has closed all of its schools and universities because of the virus, and the country's National Health Council said all Saturday's soccer games would be played without public audiences. Watch an alarmed Mexico City react with face masks, cancellations »
WHO has sent experts to Mexico at the request of the country's government, Chan said.
All of the U.S. patients have recovered or are expected to. Two of the border cases were in Texas, near San Antonio, and seven of the cases were in southern California, the CDC said. Watch for more on the U.S. cases »
More than 1,300 people with flu-like symptoms have been admitted to hospitals in Mexico, and officials are trying to determine how many of those patients have swine flu, the country's health minister, Cordova said.
U.S. health officials said Friday that some cases of the virus matched samples of the deadly Mexican virus.
On Saturday, New York's Bureau of Communicable Diseases said preliminary tests from a Queens school suggest that eight out of the nine children tested probably have the swine flu virus.
Health Library
MayoClinic.com: Influenza (flu)
Dr. Don Weiss said up to 200 students at the school reported feeling ill.
He said the samples will be sent to the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, to determine the subtype of the strain. The results could be known as early as Sunday.
"What's concerning about this is, first, that it's likely swine flu; second is that at this time it is spreading from person to person," said New York City health Commissioner Thomas Frieden. Watch news conference with NYC health department spokesman »
When the flu spreads person to person, instead of from animals to humans, it can continue to mutate, making it a tougher strain that is harder to treat or fight off. Watch author John Barry discuss potential for a pandemic »
The infected people in Kansas are a man who had recently traveled to Mexico and his wife, officials said. Neither of them was hospitalized, said Dr. Jason Eberhart-Phillips, director of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
The United States had not issued any travel warnings or quarantines by Saturday evening.
The Canadian Public Health Agency had issued a travel health notice, saying, "The Public Health Agency of Canada is tracking clusters of severe respiratory illness with deaths in Mexico." Watch CBC report on Canadian microbiologists' concerns »
Symptoms of swine flu include fever, lethargy, lack of appetite, coughing, runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, the CDC said.
Besser advised people with flu-like symptoms to stay home from work or school and to see a doctor
More information will be posted as I find it and as it comes in.
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