Last Updated: May 17, 2009 04:26 EDT
By Masaki Kondo and Mathew Carr
May 17 (Bloomberg) -- Swine flu sickened 21 more students in Japan and Turkey reported its first case of the potentially pandemic virus that’s spread to about 40 countries.
Nine high school students in Osaka, western Japan, tested positive for swine flu and another 12 are infected in nearby Kobe city, including the country’s first reported case of local transmission, Haruki Ogawa, a health ministry spokesman, said by phone from Tokyo today. A U.S. citizen who arrived in Istanbul was found to have the virus, Turkish officials said yesterday.
Health officials are trying to gauge whether swine flu, known as H1N1, is spreading in people not linked with international travel in communities outside North America, where most of the more than 8,000 cases worldwide have occurred. Evidence of that would prompt the World Health Organization to declare the first influenza pandemic since 1968.
The health ministry is investigating the route of infection for the Japanese high school students, of whom 11 are male, Ogawa said. The infected students in Osaka attend the same school, the spokesman said. Seven of the 12 in Kobe are from one school, and the ministry is checking on the others, he said.
Seven students at Kobe High School tested positive, Principal Yukihiro Okano said by phone. Nobuo Yamanouchi, vice principal of Hyogo High School in Kobe city, said five female students were confirmed to be infected.
Local Spread
A high-school student in Kobe who said he didn’t go overseas tested positive for swine flu after coming down with fever, Shinsuke Izumi, assistant manager at Kobe city’s crisis management center, said yesterday. That was Japan’s first reported case of local transmission of the virus.
The Kobe school district will close 75 kindergartens and schools through May 22 in response to the cases, Kazuko Takatsu, a spokeswoman at the city’s board of education, said yesterday. The closure will affect about 36,000 students, she said.
The latest cases take the number of confirmed swine flu infections in Japan to 25, after three students and a teacher from an Osaka high school returned from Oakville town in Ontario, Canada, earlier this month and were tested positive.
The four aren’t from the same high school as the infected students reported today, Ogawa said.
Thirty-six nations have officially reported 8,451 cases of swine flu, including 72 deaths, according to the latest update on the WHO’s Web site. The list doesn’t include cases reported by India, Malaysia and Turkey. The WHO’s pandemic alert is at phase 5, the second-highest level.
Infection in Turkey
Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag said yesterday the virus was detected by scanning passengers with a thermal camera at the Istanbul International Airport, where the patient arrived on May 14 from Amsterdam to go to Iraq.
The Iraqi visitor with U.S. citizenship and five members of his family are being treated in Istanbul, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a news conference.
China’s Ministry of Health yesterday confirmed its third swine flu infection in an 18-year-old woman who recently returned to Beijing from school in New York. India said a 23- year-old who traveled to Hyderabad, southern India, through Dubai from New York became its first case of H1N1 infection.
Sweden confirmed its third case of swine flu, the Associated Press reported, citing the country’s Institute for Infectious Disease Control. The latest patient is a woman in her 60s who had recently visited San Diego, in California, the news agency said.
The U.K. confirmed two more cases, taking its total to 87, the Department of Health said yesterday.
Mexico, which has the highest death toll from swine flu, said yesterday that 3,102 people in the country have been sickened by the virus. The number includes 68 deaths.
To contact the reporters on this story: Masaki Kondo in Tokyo at mkondo3@bloomberg.net; Mathew Carr in London at m.carr@bloomberg.net.
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