May 20 (Bloomberg) -- The deepening swine flu outbreak led Japan’s government to shut more than 4,000 schools and spurred the World Health Organization to urge drugmakers such as Sanofi- Aventis SA and GlaxoSmithKline Plc to start preparing a vaccine.
Japan shut 4,464 schools in six prefectures, up from 4,043 the central government originally asked to close, the education ministry said by fax today. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan yesterday endorsed a panel’s recommendation that drugmakers develop batches of swine flu vaccine for testing.
The spread in Japan of swine flu may prompt the WHO to declare a pandemic, according to Hitoshi Oshitani, former head of the agency’s Western Pacific region. Japan said its case total jumped to 188 from 4 less than two weeks ago, and Taiwan today reported its first patient infected with the virus known as H1N1, which has sickened about 10,000 people in 40 countries.
“The WHO will have to take the Japanese cases into consideration when deciding whether to raise the pandemic alert,” Oshitani said in a May 18 interview. “Japan is definitely having human-to-human transmission.”
The Geneva-based organization asked drugmakers to speed production of the protective shot for seasonal influenza, which can kill up to 500,000 people a year, while scientists take a few more weeks to select the fastest-growing strain of the virus to form the basis of a pandemic vaccine.
Because Chan adopted the panel’s recommendation, the same group will meet again in a few weeks to review the speed at which pharmaceutical companies are building their seasonal vaccine stockpiles as well as the spread and severity of H1N1.
Based on that assessment, they may recommend drugmakers switch from making seasonal flu vaccines to swine flu ones. Chan will then decide whether to endorse the panel’s advice.
‘Be Prepared’
“We should be prepared,” Chan said in an interview on May 15. “We don’t want to give the virus a chance to surprise us again and again.”
The education ministry in Japan said the school closures range from kindergartens to universities in six prefectures, including Osaka and Hyogo and their surrounds. They account for 7.7 percent of about 58,300 schools in Japan.
The Asahi newspaper said today that 233 people in three prefectures are infected, higher than the ministry figure. Japan reported its first locally transmitted swine flu cases on May 16, in two students and a teacher from an Osaka high school returning from Ontario, Canada.
Japan’s health ministry said it analyzed the movements of 57 of those infected and found about 2,900 people were in close contact with them. The authority is conducting further investigation, Tadashi Fujitani, a health ministry spokesman, said by phone today.
Switching Focus
Japan said it will change the way it deals with the outbreak.
“We are planning to change the focus to managing the outbreak in the country, from preventing the entrance of the virus, because we have limited staff,” Japan’s Health Minister Yoichi Masuzoe said today at a parliamentary session. The changes may be announced as early as this week, he said.
Hong Kong will drop immediate quarantines of people who may have had contact with the infected and instead focus on medical surveillance and daily clinical checks, part of a new approach by health officials dealing with the outbreak.
The city is probably at the “late stage of containment” and will move to mitigation when the first local case occurs, Gabriel Leung, undersecretary for food and health, said yesterday.
Taiwan, Australia Infections
Taiwan’s first confirmed case of swine flu involves a 52- year-old foreigner working as a doctor on cruise lines, the island’s Centers for Disease Control said today.
Australia’s New South Wales and Victoria states, the nation’s two most populous, confirmed cases of swine flu today.
The global outbreak extended to 9,830 cases in 40 nations, including 79 deaths, according to the WHO’s latest tally. The U.S. has 5,123 infections, the highest for any country.
Health officials are assessing whether swine flu is spreading widely enough for the WHO to raise its alert response to phase 6, the highest level, and declare the first pandemic since 1968.
“The H1N1 virus is not going away despite what you may have heard,” said Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “It’s still circulating in the U.S. and people are continuing to get sick, to get hospitalized and to die.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Kanoko Matsuyama in Tokyo at kmatsuyama2@bloomberg.net; Jason Gale in Singapore at j.gale@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: May 20, 2009 01:45 EDT
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