WORLD> News
|
WORLD> News
|
|
Mexico has thousands more flu cases: Study
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-13 09:16 MEXICO CITY: The H1N1 flu virus spread to more countries Tuesday as scientists estimated the new strain could have sickened 23,000 people in Mexico alone before anyone realized it was an epidemic. Fidel Castro, meanwhile, accused Mexico of hiding the epidemic until after US President Barack Obama visited last month.
Mexican Health Secretary Jose Cordova said his nation's shutdown of schools - which was lifted in most of the country's 31 states on Monday - had averted an avalanche of cases. "It would have been difficult for us to have controlled this epidemic," Cordova said in a statement, adding that Mexico had 56 deaths and 2,059 confirmed cases of swine flu.
"Mexican authorities did not inform the world of the presence (of the H1N1 flu), while they waited for Obama's visit," he wrote on a government website hours after Cuba confirmed its first swine flu case. Obama's April 16 visit came a week before Mexican health officials announced H1N1 flu was spreading, prompting an eventual mass shutdown that brought many parts of the country to a virtual halt. Thailand, Finland find cases Thailand and Finland reported their first confirmed cases Tuesday of people just arrived from Mexico. Cuba, which had imposed strict measures on flights and travelers from Mexico, reported its first confirmed cases on Monday. Cuba identified its patient as a Mexican student attending a Cuban medical school. At least 61 people have been killed by swine flu around the world, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed over 5,250 cases. Cuba's Health Ministry said a group of medical students from Mexico began arriving on the island to resume their studies on April 25 - four days before Cuban authorities halted airline flights from Mexico. Fourteen of the students suffered from flu-like symptoms. A study published on Monday in the journal Science estimated Mexico alone may have had 23,000 cases of H1N1 flu by April 23, the day it announced the epidemic. The study estimates H1N1 flu kills between 0.4 percent and 1.4 percent of its victims, but lead author Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London, said the data remain incomplete. The analysis in Science suggests there are many more cases than those confirmed by laboratories - anywhere from 6,000 to 32,000 cases in Mexico as of April 23. Virus could mutate The new H1N1 flu virus could still mutate into a more virulent form and spark an influenza pandemic that could be expected to circle the globe up to three times, the WHO said Tuesday. The impact of any pandemic would vary, as a virus that causes only mild illness in countries with strong health systems can become "devastating" in those with weak health systems, shortages of drugs and poorly equipped hospitals, it said. The new virus "appears to be more contagious than seasonal influenza" and nearly the world's whole population lacks immunity to the new disease, the WHO said in a document issued overnight entitled Assessing the severity of an influenza pandemic. "It attempts to explain different aspects of severity, not just the pathogenicity of the virus but its impact on health and social systems," WHO spokesman Thomas Abraham said. "It is in response to questions from the public and media." The UN agency's pandemic alert level is at 5, its second-highest level on a scale of 1 to 6, he said. This means that the virus shows no signs of sustained person-to-person spread outside North America. AP |
