H1N1 under the microscope

Geneva: A WHO official says health experts are looking very closely at the spread of swine flu among people in Spain, Britain and Japan, as the outbreak dominates the World Health Organization's annual meeting this week.

The UN says Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will visit WHO tomorrow and meet with senior representatives from the vaccine industry. It declined to say which companies will take part in the meeting.

The health assembly will run through May 22, five days shorter than initially planned because health ministries around the world are busy fighting off the swine flu outbreak.

Meanwhile, the number of cases of H1N1 flu in Japan climbed to 44 yesterday with the disease spreading mainly among high school students in western Japan, many of whom have not travelled abroad, a Health Ministry official said.

Japan has now confirmed 40 cases in Hyogo and Osaka prefectures, 37 of which are among high school students, said ministry official Keiichiro Suemasa.

That comes on top of four previous cases among people returning from abroad.

The ministry has been able to confirm that 24 of the students have not been abroad, Suemasa said.

Kyodo News reported that around 570 schools in the two prefectures have decided to suspend classes in the wake of the latest flu cases.

The WHO said on Saturday it was closely monitoring the situation in Japan. It raised its pandemic alert on April 29 to 5 on a scale of 6, meaning a pandemic is imminent. Proof the disease was spreading in a region outside North America, where it originated, would trigger an increase to 6.

Health Minister Yoichi Masuzoe said on Saturday authorities would try to determine who had been in close contact with infected students and take steps such as asking such people to stay at home in an effort to prevent the spread of the virus.

The new virus is behaving much like a seasonal influenza strain - spreading rapidly and causing mainly mild symptoms.

An 18-year-old student in Beijing who recently returned from a US university has swine flu, mainland China's third confirmed case, the Health Ministry said, while a hospital yesterday discharged the first patient.

The woman, a native of Beijing identified only by her surname, Liu, arrived in the city May 11 on a Continental Airlines flight and went to a hospital three days later with fever, headache, cough, sore muscles and other symptoms, the ministry said late Saturday.

The hospital suspected Liu had swine flu and transferred her to Beijing's infectious diseases hospital late last week, the ministry said. Lab tests by the country's Centre for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the diagnosis Saturday. The ministry said those who had close contact with Liu have been placed under observation and none of them seemed unwell.

The new swine flu case brings the total number on the mainland to three, while the Chinese territory of Hong Kong has another two, including a Mexican man who flew there via Shanghai.

The mainland's first swine flu patient, a man surnamed Bao, was discharged on Sunday from the Chengdu Infectious Disease Hospital.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 282 people who were quarantined in southwest China's Sichuan province and in Beijing for being in close contact with people with swine flu were released Saturday.