By Tom Randall and Andres R. Martinez
April 25 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu struck hundreds people in Mexico City, California and Texas, raising the threat of pandemic and leading health authorities to distribute masks and shutter schools, museums, movie theaters and libraries.
At least 68 died and more than 1,000 became sick with flu- like symptoms in the Mexico City region in the past month, Jose Cordova, Mexico’s Health Minister, told reporters yesterday. Swine flu was confirmed in 20 of the deaths so far, he said. Of 14 tissue samples tested from Mexico, half were a genetic match with the swine flu reported in eight people in California and Texas, the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said.
The new influenza strain, a conglomeration of genetic fragments from swine, bird and human viruses, is the biggest threat of a large-scale flu pandemic since the emergence of the H5N1 strain that has killed millions of birds and hundreds of people, said William Schaffner, an influenza expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee.
“It recombined to create something totally new,” David Butler-Jones, Canada’s chief public health minister, told reporters yesterday. “How, when, or where it did that I don’t think we know.
“What it will lead to is impossible to predict,” Butler- Jones said. “It is very concerning.”
The World Health Organization is using its Strategic Health Operations Center, a war room-type facility at its Geneva headquarters, to coordinate its response, said Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the agency.
Emergency Meeting
The United Nations agency will hold an emergency teleconference with 15 international experts at 4 p.m. Geneva time today to decide whether the situation constitutes “a public health event of international concern,” Hartl said in a telephone interview today.
If the panel decides it does, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan will immediately convene a separate meeting to discuss whether the agency’s level of pandemic alert needs to be increased. It is currently at level 3, meaning there is no or very limited human-to-human transmission of a potential pandemic virus.
“We are taking this very seriously,” Hartl said yesterday. The disease is affecting “otherwise healthy adults,” he said.
International health experts say that the world is now closer to another influenza pandemic than at any time since 1968, when the last of the previous century’s three pandemics occurred.
Pandemic Alert
WHO uses a series of six phases of pandemic alert as a system for informing the world of the seriousness of the threat and of the need to launch progressively more intense preparedness activities.
“It is too early to say whether this will lead to a larger outbreak or could represent the appearance of potential pandemic strain of influenza virus,” the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said in a report yesterday.
Teams of disease sleuths have been sent to California and Texas to trace how the malady has spread, and the U.S. offered to send scientists to Mexico, said Richard Besser, acting director of the CDC, during a conference call yesterday. U.S. hospitals are being asked to collect samples from patients with flu-like symptoms, said Schaffner, chief of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt, in a telephone interview yesterday.
“They are asking us who work in hospitals to go to our emergency rooms and our pediatric wards to gather specimens and start testing them,” Schaffner said. “This has a sense of urgency about it.”
Schools Closed
Mexico’s government closed schools, museums, movie theaters and libraries in Mexico City and surrounding areas until further notice, according to an e-mail from the National Arts and Culture Council. It’s also handing out free facemasks and extending the deadline for filing taxes until May 31, Cordova said. A million doses of antiviral medicine are available for distribution, he said.
Twenty-four cases, including three deaths, have been reported in San Luis Potosi, in central Mexico, and four cases have been found in Mexicali near the border with the U.S., according to the WHO.
Flu can spread quickly when a new strain emerges because no one has natural immunity and a vaccine takes months to develop. The so-called 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which killed as many as 50 million people, began when an avian flu virus jumped to people, experts said.
The new flu virus contains four different gene segments, representing strains from birds, pigs and humans from North America and Eurasia, CDC said.
“Our concern has grown since yesterday in light of what we’ve learned since then,” said Besser of the Atlanta-based CDC. “This is something we’re worried about and taking very seriously. We are moving quickly, being very aggressive in our approach.”
Obama Informed
President Barack Obama is being briefed, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters yesterday. California activated its Joint Emergency Operations Center of the Department of Public Health, in coordination with the California Emergency Management Agency, according to an e-mailed statement from the office of the Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The virus is contagious and spreading from human to human, the CDC said in a statement on its Web site. The U.S. patients began feeling sick from March 28 to April 19. All have recovered and only one was hospitalized, according to the CDC. None had direct contact with pigs.
Available Treatments
GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s flu treatment Relenza and Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu appear effective against the strains of the virus the CDC has tested, the companies said. Glaxo has “ample supplies” of Relenza, Sarah Alspach, spokeswoman for the London-based drugmaker, said yesterday in a telephone interview. Roche, based in Basel, Switzerland, has a stockpile of 5 million Tamiflu doses ready to deploy if WHO asks, said Terry Hurley, a company spokesman.
The U.S. isn’t restricting travel to Mexico, Besser said. Cordova, Mexico’s health minister, said there’s no need to shut workplaces, and the pace of infections and deaths has slowed in the past day. The first case of the swine flu was seen in Mexico on April 13.
The airport for the city of Toluca, about 60 kilometers (37.3 miles) west of Mexico City, is screening travelers to determine whether they may have been infected, according to the government of the state of Mexico. Brazil is intensifying surveillance of ports, airports and borders, checking health of travelers, the Agency for Sanitary Vigilance said on its Web site.
The outbreak is affecting tourism, Octavio Martinez Vargas, a lawmaker from the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, said in a statement from his office.
Mexico’s lower house of congress is considering holding sessions outdoors to avoid spreading the illness, said Javier Gonzalez Garza, head of the PRD in the lower house, according to an e-mailed statement.
To contact the reporters on this story: Tom Randall in New York at trandall6@bloomberg.net; Andres Martinez in Mexico City at amartinez28@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 25, 2009 01:39 EDT
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