Saturday, May 9, 2009

Japan, Australia Confirm First Swine Flu; China Proposes Summit

By Simeon Bennett

May 9 (Bloomberg) -- Japan and Australia confirmed their first cases of swine flu, as Hong Kong released 351 people from a week-long quarantine and China proposed hosting an international scientific conference on the virus.

China’s proposal comes after Asian health ministers called on the World Health Organization to review its criteria for declaring a flu pandemic. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations said the Geneva-based WHO should include a broader range of indicators such as the severity of illness a virus causes and whether it’s mutated to make it more virulent, Asean said in a statement distributed to reporters in Bangkok yesterday.

Disease trackers are monitoring 88 cases in Spain and 34 in the U.K. to determine whether the virus has established itself outside North America. Such a finding would prompt the WHO to declare a pandemic, the first since 1968, the agency has said. Asean said that may cause people to panic over a virus that so far has caused symptoms no worse than seasonal flu and only 44 confirmed deaths.

“We are at level 5, but there is some evidence this may be just like seasonal influenza,” Kamnuan Ungchoosak, an official at the Thai Health Ministry’s Department of Disease Control, said in an interview yesterday. “The perception is that, once you raise from one level to another level, it means there is more danger, more severity, a greater threat,” he said.

WTO Panel

A World Health Organization panel will meet May 14 to decide whether drugmakers should begin producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine against the new illness. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general of health, security and environment, said swine flu may spread to at least one-third of the world’s 6 billion people in the next year. The virus, formally known as H1N1, has infected at least 2,500 people in 28 nations, including Japan and Australia.

Two students and a teacher returning from Canada tested positive for swine flu, Japan’s first confirmed cases, and the government quarantined 49 people from the same flight, Health Minister Yoichi Masuzoe said today.

The male students and a teacher in his 40s at an Osaka high school arrived at Narita airport outside Tokyo yesterday from Detroit after traveling to Ontario, Canada, on April 24 for an exchange program, Masuzoe said at a news conference in Tokyo.

The three, with symptoms including fever and coughs, are in isolation at a hospital near the airport. The students are recovering, while the teacher is being treated with the antiviral drug Tamiflu, Masuzoe said.

Passengers, Crew

Forty-nine passengers and crew from the flight are in 10- day quarantine at nearby hotels, the minister said.

Australia confirmed its first case of swine flu in a woman who returned on a flight to Brisbane from Los Angeles last week, Health Minister Nicola Roxon said in Canberra today.

The woman had been unwell in late April before she returned to Australia on Qantas Airways Ltd. flight QF16 and was swabbed at Brisbane Airport on May 7. The tests confirmed a “mild case” of swine flu, Roxon said.

“We have a person who had contracted the disease overseas and had fully recovered by the time they had returned to Australia,” Roxon told reporters. “We will be contacting people sitting a few rows in front of her and a few rows behind, but she was most likely to have been no longer infectious.”

Hong Kong released 286 people quarantined in a downtown hotel that was the site of the city’s first confirmed swine flu case. A further 61 were allowed to leave a holiday village and four were discharged from a local hospital.

Guests and staff at the Metropark Hotel in the Wanchai district were permitted to leave at 8:30 p.m. local time yesterday as their quarantine order expired and they showed no flu-like symptoms, said York Chow, secretary for food and health.

“They sacrificed freedom for seven days to give confidence to Hong Kong people,” Chow told reporters outside the hotel. Donald Tsang, the city’s chief executive, spoke to guests and staff before they left the hotel and was seen bowing as he addressed them in the lobby.

No comments: