First US Swine Flu Death
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A Mexican toddler in Texas has died of the H1N1 flu strain, the first confirmed death outside Mexico from a virus which health officials fear could cause a pandemic as it spread to two more countries in Europe.
Nearly a week after the threat emerged in Mexico, where up to 159 people have died, U.S. officials said on Wednesday a 23-month-old boy had died in the state bordering Mexico.
A Houston city health official said the baby was Mexican, fell ill two weeks ago in the U.S. border town of Brownsville and died in a Houston hospital.
“It is important for everyone to know that while the death occurred in Houston …
Richard Besser, acting head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he expected more bad news even though most of the 65 U.S. cases of swine flu were mild.
France said it would seek on Thursday a European Union ban on flights to Mexico because of the influenza outbreak.
Cases have been confirmed in Canada, New Zealand, Israel and Spain.
In the United States, a state health official in Massachusetts confirmed that two children had tested positive for the virus.
The World Health Organization said it might raise its pandemic alert level to phase five — the second highest — if it were confirmed that infected people in at least two countries were spreading the disease to other people in a sustained way.
H1N1 swine flu poses the biggest risk of a large-scale pandemic since avian flu re-emerged in 2003, killing 257 people of 421 infected in 15 countries.
In 1968 a “Hong Kong” flu pandemic killed about 1 million people globally, with twice that number dying a decade earlier.
Wall Street opened higher on Wednesday even as data showed the U.S. economy shrank at a steeper pace than expected and traders looked beyond flu fears for hopeful signs that the recession may be abating.
The new strain contains DNA from avian, swine and human viruses and appears to have evolved the ability to pass easily from one person to another, unlike most swine H1N1 viruses.
The World Trade Organization said on Wednesday it had not been told officially of any such bans, and the EU and Japan said they would not follow suit.
Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said more than 1,300 people were in hospitals, some of them seriously ill, out of a total of about 2,500 suspected cases.
In a sign of how mild many cases outside Mexico have been, New Zealand gave the all-clear for a group of students and a teacher who caught the virus.
