Mexico's president assumes emergency powers to isolate people infected with deadly swine flu strain; cases confirmed in the U.S. -- Article here, plus "swine flu questions and answers"
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Hiram Diaz, 8, left, gives his 6-year-old sister Adely Diaz a ride on the pegs of his bicycle while wearing protective masks near the market where their parents own a store in Mexico City, Saturday, April 25, 2009. Mexico is struggling with a new strain of swine flu that has killed 68 and sickened more than 1,000. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a 'public health emergency of international concern.'
(AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Julio Cortez)Mexico fights swine flu with 'pandemic potential'
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.
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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.
Article: HERE
An unidentified woman wears a protective mask while waiting outside of the emergency room at Hospital Ruben Lenero in Mexico City, on Saturday, April 25, 2009. Mexico is struggling with a new strain of swine flu that has killed 68 and sickened more than 1,000. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a 'public health emergency of international concern.'
(AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Julio Cortez)Questions and answers about swine flu
Mexico is contending with an outbreak of swine flu, suspected in the deaths of dozens of people and sickening perhaps 1,000. In the United States, at least eight cases have been confirmed with the infection, all of them in California and Texas; only one person was hospitalized. Here are some questions and answers about the illness:
Q. What is swine flu?
A. Swine flu is a respiratory illness in pigs caused by a virus. The swine flu virus routinely causes outbreaks in pigs but doesn't usually kill many of them.
Q. Can people get swine flu?
A. Swine flu viruses don't usually infect humans. There have been occasional cases, usually among people who've had direct contact with infected pigs, such as farm workers. "We've seen swine influenza in humans over the past several years, and in most cases, it's come from direct pig contact. This seems to be different," said Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert with the University of Michigan.
Q. Can it spread among humans?
A. There have been cases of the virus spreading from human to human, probably in the same way as seasonal flu, through coughing and sneezing by infected people.
Q. What are the symptoms of swine flu?
A. The symptoms are similar to those of regular flu — fever, cough, fatigue, lack of appetite.
Q. Is the same swine flu virus making people sick in Mexico and the U.S.?
A. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the Mexican virus samples match the U.S. virus. The virus is a mix of human virus, bird virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.
Q. Are there drugs to treat swine flu in humans?
A. There are four different drugs approved in the U.S. to treat the flu, but the new virus has shown resistance to the two oldest. The CDC recommends the use of the flu drugs Tamiflu and Relenza.
Q. Does a regular flu shot protect against swine flu?
A. The seasonal flu vaccine used in the U.S. this year won't likely provide protection against the latest swine flu virus. There is a swine flu vaccine for pigs but not for humans.
Q. Should residents of California or Texas do anything special?
A. The CDC recommends routine precautions to prevent the spread of infectious diseases: wash your hands often, cover your nose and mouth when you cough or sneeze, avoid close contact with sick people. If you are sick, stay at home and limit contact with others.
Q. What about traveling to Mexico?
A. The CDC has not warned Americans against traveling to Mexico but advises that they be aware of the illnesses there and take precautions to protect against infections, like washing their hands.
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Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
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On the Net:
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/swine/key_facts.htm
HERE
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Play Video : Mexico flu deaths raise global epidemic fears AP
People walk inside Mexico City's international airport wearing face masks as prevention against the swine flu virus. US concerns grew Friday over a deadly outbreak of human swine flu in neighboring Mexico, as an eighth person was diagnosed with the same strain of influenza, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said.
(AFP/Ronaldo Schemidt)...
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