Health experts say extraordinary measures against swine flu — most notably quarantines imposed by China, where entire planeloads of passengers were isolated if one traveler had symptoms — have failed to contain the disease.

Despite initially declaring success, Beijing now acknowledges its swine flu outbreak is much larger than official numbers show.

China’s official count of some 63,000 reported illnesses with 53 deaths dwarfs estimates of millions of cases with nearly 4,000 deaths in the United States, a nation with about a third of China’s population.

Dr. Michael O’Leary, WHO’s top representative in China, says there has been a dramatic spike in Chinese swine flu cases recently and those reported by the government are only “minimum numbers.”

“We have new cases occurring all the time,” he told The Associated Press last week. “There’s always more deaths than we could possibly know about.”

Source/Full Story:  Yahoo! News
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In Ukraine, schools have been closed, all public events have been banned and restrictions imposed on people’s movements after the country confirmed its first death from H1N1 swine flu.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced a three-week period of precautionary measures and health officials are said to be considering introducing quarantine across the country..

An outbreak of flu and pneumonia has killed 30 people in western Ukraine since mid-October, but until now officials have been insisting the H1N1 strain was not the cause.

A health ministry spokeswoman said not all the dead were tested, but checks on one body have proved positive.

In western Ukraine more than 5,000 flu cases have been registered during the last week. Tests are now being carried out to determine the origin of the virus.

Source/Full Story:  euronews
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Cases of swine flu in the UK have almost doubled this week, the Department of Health revealed today, as the outbreak imposes increasing pressure on intensive care beds.

So far 122 people have died after contracting the H1N1 virus and more than 500 are being treated in hospital, of whom 99 are in critical care – the highest figure since the disease emerged. Children appear to be vulnerable to higher rates of infection.

Emergency planners have, however, downgraded the UK’s worst case scenario, calculating this month that as many as 1,000 people could die during the pandemic infection. Far more of the victims are likely to be younger patients, unlike the normal pattern of seasonal flu, which affects the elderly most severely.

Estimates of likely casualties have come down progressively over the past few months from an initial upper assessment of 65,000 deaths, later reduced to 19,000 and now cut back again.

Source/Full Story: The Guardian
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U.S. health officials have lost track of how many illnesses and deaths have been caused by the first global flu epidemic in 40 years.

And they did it on purpose.

Government doctors stopped counting swine flu cases in July, when they estimated more than 1 million were infected in this country. The number of deaths has been sitting at more than 600 since early September.

Other nations have stopped relying on lab-confirmed cases, too, and health officials say the current monitoring system is adequate. But not having specific, accurate counts of swine flu means the government doesn’t have a clear picture of how hard the infection is hitting some groups of people, said Andrew Pekosz, a flu expert at Johns Hopkins University.

The novel H1N1 flu seems to be more dangerous for children, young adults, pregnant women and even the obese, according to studies based on small numbers of patients. But exactly how much more at risk those people are is hard to gauge if the overall numbers are fuzzy.

“This wasn’t as critical early on, when case numbers were low,” said Pekosz. But now, it’s hard to say exactly how swine flu’s dangers vary from group to group, he said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is relying on a patchwork system of gathering death and hospitalization numbers. Some states are reporting lab-confirmed cases. Others report illnesses that could be the new swine flu, seasonal flu or some other respiratory disease.

Some say that’s a more sensible approach than only counting lab-confirmed cases. Many people who got sick never get tested, so the tally of swine flu cases was off almost from the very beginning, they say.

“It was a vast underestimate,” said Dr. Zack Moore, a respiratory disease expert for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.

Source/Full Story: Yahoo! News
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Mexico was hit with 1,341 new swine flu cases since Monday, bringing the total to 26,338 ahead of the usual autumn flu season, health officials said on Friday.

The Health Ministry said one more person died from the A(H1N1) virus between Monday and Thursday, bringing the death toll to 218 in the country where the virus first emerged in April before becoming a pandemic.

In late August, Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova estimated that nearly one million people could be infected by the virus during the winter, out of a total population of 100 million in Mexico.

The global flu death toll has reached 3,486, up 281 from a week ago, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has reported 296,471 known cases of infection.

That number is seen as far below actual figures as some countries lack systematic analysis.

The UN agency said the Americas region still has the highest death toll, at 2,625. The Asia-Pacific region reported 620 fatalities, while Europe recorded at least 140 deaths. In the Middle East, 61 people succumbed to the virus while in Africa, 40 people have died from it.

Source/Full Story: The Times of India
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Greece will vaccinate its entire population of 12 million against the H1N1 swine flu pandemic which has swept around the world in weeks, killing hundreds of people, the country’s health minister said on Friday.

The Mediterranean country, which receives about 15 million tourists every year, has confirmed more than 700 swine flu cases and no deaths, but world health experts say the true number of cases globally is far higher as only a few patients get tested.

“We decided that the entire population, all citizens and residents, without any exception, will be vaccinated against the flu,” Health Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos said after a ministerial meeting.

Source/Full Story: HEALTH News

The Government is unlikely to keep schools closed in the autumn as it would be “too disruptive” despite scientists claiming it could cut the number of swine flu cases by up to 45 per cent.

Researchers from the department of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London said that asking parents to keep their children at home in September could stifle transmission and buy time to produce vaccines.

Professor Neil Ferguson and Dr Simon Cauchemez quoted a recent French study that said that proactive school closures, before mass infections took hold in the close confines of school classrooms, would cut the number of swine flu cases by 13 to 17 per cent overall and by between 38 and 45 per cent at the peak of the outbreak.

The swine flu virus has been disproportionately prevalent in young children.

“It is… hoped that closure of schools during the pandemic might break the chains of transmission, with the following potential benefits,” they wrote in the Lancet medical journal.

“(These are) reducing the total number of cases; slowing the epidemic to give more time for vaccine production; and reducing the incidence of cases at the peak of the epidemic, limiting both the stress on healthcare systems and peak absenteeism in the general population.”

Source/Full Story: Times Online

Uganda’s Health Ministry says the country has confirmed its first case of H1N1 swine flu.

Ugandan health official James Kakooza said Thursday that a 40-year-old British man tested positive for the virus after arriving in Entebbe on June 26. 
Kakooza said the man came from London through Nairobi, Kenya.

Uganda is the seventh sub-Saharan nation to report swine flu cases – along with Kenya, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Mauritius, and South Africa.

The World Health Organization said that as of Wednesday, 332 people have died from the swine flu virus, and more than 77,000 people have been diagnosed worldwide.

In June, the WHO declared an influenza pandemic for the first time in more than 40 years.
The H1N1 strain of swine flu is a highly contagious new virus that quickly spread around the world this year.

Source/Full Story: VOA News

Britain faces a projected 100,000 new swine flu cases a day by the end of August and must revamp its flu strategy, the nation’s health minister said Thursday.

Britain has officially reported 7,447 swine flu cases and three deaths, but officials acknowledge the real number of cases is far higher, since many with the virus have not been tested.

Britain is the hardest-hit nation in Europe amid the global swine flu epidemic. Many flu experts believe numbers could jump exponentially now that the virus is entrenched. Because swine flu, or H1N1, is a new virus, few people have any natural immunity, allowing the virus to spread rapidly.

“Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August,” Health Minister Andy Burnham told the House of Commons on Thursday.

Britain has been reporting several hundred new swine flu cases daily for the last several weeks. If that surges to 100,000 cases a day by the end of August, there could be 6 million people infected by the fall, or 10 per cent of Britain’s 60 million population.

Source/Full Story: MSN News

Swine flu has infected as many as 1 million Americans, U.S. health officials said Thursday, adding that 6 percent or more of some urban populations are infected. The estimate voiced by a government flu scientist Thursday was no surprise to the experts who have been closely watching the virus.

“We knew diagnosed cases were just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert who was in Atlanta for the meeting of a vaccine advisory panel.

Lyn Finelli, a flu surveillance official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made the 1 million estimate in a presentation to the vaccine panel. The number is from mathematical modeling, based on surveys by health officials.

Regular seasonal flu sickens anywhere from 15 million to 60 million Americans each year.

The United States has roughly half the world’s swine flu cases, with nearly 28,000 reported to the CDC so far. The U.S. count includes 3,065 hospitalizations and 127 deaths.

Source/Full Story: washingtonpost.com

The influenza A/H1N1 epidemic swept over the Middle East region as infections continued to climb across the region and more countries previously immune to the flu saw their first confirmed cases.

Oman’s Health Ministry last Wednesday confirmed its first three A/H1N1 cases, which was three Omani students studying in the United States, the first such cases in the Sultanate.

Algerian Health Ministry on Sunday confirmed the country’s second case of A/H1N1 flu, just one day after the North African country found its first confirmed case.

One daughter of the Algerian woman arriving from the United States, who has been confirmed as the first case in Algeria Saturday, was diagnosed with A/H1N1 flu after undergoing tests.

The number of A/H1N1 flu cases in Jordan increased to nine after seven more cases were confirmed last Wednesday.

The seven patients, three Palestinians and four Jordanians, were all arrived from the U.S..

Earlier that day, Jordan Health Ministry said two Palestinians and a Jordanian were tested positive for the flu virus. During a second update that day, a Palestinian girl and three Jordanian youth who returned from a Scout camp tour in Washington were also confirmed infected with the virus.

The Moroccan health authorities on Thursday confirmed eight A/H1N1 flu cases since the introduction of the virus in the north African country on June 10, bring its total number of confirmed cases to 10.

Seven of the eight patients came on flights from Canada between June 9th to 15th, and the eighth came from the United States.

Egypt on Sunday reported five new confirmed A/H1N1 flu cases, bring to 39 the total number of confirmed cases in the most populous Arab country.

The five patients were an Egyptian-American girl who arrived from the U.S., an Egyptian-Canadian boy and his sister who arrived from Canada, an Egyptian 66-year-old woman who arrived from the U.S. and a 10-year-old Egyptian-American girl.

Egypt, which in late April killed all its pigs to keep the highly infectious flu out of the country, reported its first A/H1N1 flu case on June 2.

In Israel, after 39 new cases of A/H1N1 influenza were confirmed on Thursday, another 52 influenza A/H1N1 cases were reported over the weekend, these latest cases brought the total number of confirmed cases to 271 in the Jewish state since April.

So far, the influenza has been found in the Middle East, including Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria and Oman.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 95 countries and regions have officially reported at least 44,287 cases of A/H1N1 flu, including 180 deaths.

Source/Full Story: SINA English

The World Health Organization said Tuesday a spike in swine flu cases in Australia may push it to finally announce the first flu pandemic in 41 years. It also expressed concern about an unusual rise in severe illness from the disease in Canada.

WHO’s flu chief Keiji Fukuda said the agency wanted to avoid “adverse effects” if it announces a global outbreak of swine flu. Fukuda said people might panic or that governments might take inappropriate actions if WHO declares a pandemic.

Some flu experts think the world already is in a pandemic and that WHO has caved in to country requests that a declaration be postponed.

“On the surface of it, I think we are in phase 6,” or a pandemic, said Margaret Chan, WHO’s director-general.

Chan said it was important to verify the reports that the virus is becoming established outside North America before declaring a pandemic. “The decision to make a phase 6 announcement is a heavy responsibility, a responsibility that I will take very seriously, and I need to be convinced that I have indisputable evidence,” she said.

Chan said she will hold a conference call with governments Wednesday in order to verify some of the reports she has received before making a formal announcement. “Once I get indisputable evidence, I will make the announcement,” she told reporters in Geneva.

WHO said the virus has infected 26,563 people in 73 countries and caused 140 deaths. Most of the cases have been in North America, but Australia also has seen a sharp increase in recent days.

In most of the 73 countries, the new H1N1 virus has triggered only mild illness. But the fact that some of the deaths have occurred in otherwise healthy adults has prompted WHO to classify the outbreak as “moderate” for the time being.

“Approximately half the people who have died from this H1N1 infection have been previously healthy people,” Fukuda said, adding that this was “one of the observations which has given us the most concern.”

Source/Full Story: Yahoo! News

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The number of swine flu cases in Japan soared over the weekend, raising the likelihood that the World Health Organization will soon have to raise its pandemic alert level to 6, the highest level.

On Sunday, the assistant principal of a school in Queens died after being hospitalized with swine flu. It was the sixth flu-related death in the United States and the first in New York State.

In Japan, authorities ordered more than 1,000 schools and kindergartens in and near the cities of Kobe and Osaka to shut down. There were no confirmed cases in Tokyo.

Until Friday, Japan thought it had contained the virus after finding four infected people who had visited North America and flown home. It quarantined them and 50 other passengers, began sending medical workers to meet each flight arriving from North America to take temperatures of those on board and told visitors they would need to have their temperatures recorded daily.

But on Saturday, the authorities confirmed that a 17-year-old student in Kobe who had not been overseas was infected; as of Monday afternoon, there were at least 121 recorded cases throughout Japan.

Kobe residents rushed to hospitals, where doctors in biohazard suits checked people for fever in tents set up in parking lots, Agence France-Presse reported. Transit workers and supermarket employees began wearing masks.

Japan is well known in public health circles for being exceptionally nervous about flu; it has an aging population and a national obsession with cleanliness that makes even Switzerland look messy.

Source/Full Story:: NYTimes.com

Costa Rica reported the death of a 53-year-old patient with swine flu on Saturday, the first death from the epidemic outside of a North American nation, while Japanese authorities scrambled to limit contacts with their first confirmed cases of the disease.

The Costa Rican man, who also had diabetes and chronic lung disease, was one of eight swine flu cases in the Central American country that have been confirmed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health Minister Maria Luisa Avila told The Associated Press.

Mexico has recorded 48 swine flu deaths, two have been reported in the United States and Canadian officials say a woman who died last month had swine flu.

Avila said officials had been unable to determine how the man who died became infected, but she said he had not recently travelled abroad. Many flu sufferers in other countries have been linked to recent trips to the United States or Mexico.

In Japan, authorities quarantined a high school teacher and two teenage students who returned Friday from a school trip to Canada after they tested positive at the airport. Australia and Panama joined the list of countries with confirmed cases of swine flu.

The chief medical officer for the Canadian province of Alberta, Andre Corriveau, said Friday that a woman who died on April 28 had been infected with the virus. The woman, who was in her 30s, had other health problems.

Officials said she had not left the country recently, but could not confirm whether she was in contact with anyone who had recently returned from Mexico. Corriveau said 300 people who attended the woman’s wake were being monitored for signs of the illness.

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Of the more than 100 suspected deaths from the new H1N1 virus that have emerged in Mexico, 19 had been confirmed, Cordova said. Mexico had already scaled back from its original estimate of 176 suspected deaths.

However, new cases of the mongrel virus, which mixes swine, avian and human flu strains, were still being tracked across the world. Costa Rica, Italy and Ireland confirmed cases of the disease, which has now been found in 18 countries.

In Geneva, the World Health Organization said H1N1 influenza had not spread in a sustained way outside North America, as required before the pandemic alert is raised to its highest level. But it said that would probably happen soon.

“I would still propose that a pandemic is imminent because we are seeing the disease spread,” Michael Ryan, WHO director of Global Alert and Response, told a briefing on Saturday.

Few are ready to take chances with the new virus, widely dubbed swine flu.

In Hong Kong, police quarantined a hotel for one week after a Mexican guest was found to have the virus. Mexico called Friday’s action “unjustified” and advised its citizens to avoid travel to China.

China’s Foreign Ministry had no immediate response.

Hong Kong is under Chinese control but has its own government. The authorities in Hong Kong have confined around 300 guests and staff in the hotel.

Source/Full Story::  Reuters