Sat May 16, 4:16 PM
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TOKYO (AFP) - Officials ordered schools closed and cancelled public events in the Japanese city of Kobe Saturday, after eight students tested positive for swine flu and scores more reported feeling ill.
Scientists in Canada and Mexico meanwhile handed over vital data on the virus to the World Health Organisation.
The eight confirmed cases were students at a high school in the western city of Kobe. In nearby Osaka, another nine students were considered suspected cases, local officials said.
And as fears rose in Japan that the virus would spread across the country, World Health Organization spokesman Dick Thomson told AFP in Geneva: "It is something we are looking at but we need to have an investigation."
Mexico meanwhile handed over a strain of the virus to the WHO Saturday, together with statistical and clinical data on its evolution there, said President Felipe Calderon.
He hoped it would help them come up with an effective vaccine as soon as possible, he added.
And scientists at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Saturday they had "mapped the full genetic sequence of the virus" found in swine there.
The same as the strain found in humans, it would "help scientists around the world better understand the virus and its effects on animals," they said.
A WHO tally on Saturday showed that Mexico has still lost more people to the virus than any other country: 66 out of a worldwide total of 72.
In terms of the number of cases, the WHO total had soared to 8,451 on Saturday.
The United States, followed by Mexico, where the epidemic began some three weeks ago, have recorded the highest number of cases, with 4,714 and 2,895 cases respectively.
And when later Saturday, India and Turkey reported their first infections, that brought to 38 the number of countries affected.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso called for calm after the country's first case of a domestic infection -- someone who had not picked up the virus from abroad -- was confirmed in a 17-year-old boy.
"The government will carry out thorough inspections on the patients and on the people close to them," said Aso. "We will take action to stop the infection from spreading."
But Shigeru Omi, head of the government's special swine flu task force and a former WHO senior official, said "we believe that the infection is beginning to spread in the region."
"All of a sudden, people started wearing masks today," said Reiko Hamuro, a 42-year-old transport company employee in Kobe. "It's scary because the cases came without any warning signs."
Officials in Kobe announced the temporary closure of at least 75 schools and kindergartens. They also cancelled festivals and other public events in some districts.
Japan confirmed its first cases of the influenza A(H1N1) virus contracted overseas on May 9, a school teacher and three students who flew to Tokyo from Canada via Detroit. All have since recovered.
India confirmed its first swine flu case after a 23-year-old man who had flown to Hyderabad from New York tested positive for the virus.
Quarantined with a fever on his return Wednesday, he was already free of symptoms, said a health ministry statement. Health officials were trying to contact his fellow passengers.
For the moment, the WHO is not recommending travel restrictions to stop the spread of the infection, except to advise anyone who falls ill to delay travel.
Russia nevertheless advised its citizens against travelling to Spain, the worst-hit European country with 100 cases, in a statement issued Saturday by its chief medical officer Genadi Onishenko.
Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag said their first case of swine flu had been detected in blood tests carried out on an Iraqi-born US national.
Thermal cameras detected his high fever when he arrived at Istanbul airport.
China's health ministry reported a third confirmed case on the mainland, in Beijing, late Saturday, state media reported -- an 18-year-old woman, a student who had studied in the United States, according to the Beijing authorities.
The WHO's annual assembly beginning Monday will be dominated by the alarm over the swine flu outbreak.
It has already prompted a motion to shorten the gathering from 10 days to five, so senior health officials do not spend too long away from their countries.
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Swine flu closes more New York schools, spreads in Asia
2 hours, 56 minutes agoLink
By Amy Westfeldt, The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Swine flu virus continues spreading in New York City - closing more schools and showing up in a jail - while the disease also reached farther into Asia among travellers returning from the United States.
An assistant school principal in New York remained in hospital in critical condition Saturday and a prisoner who entered the city's jail complex on Rikers Island about a month ago was diagnosed with swine flu Friday.
The city Department of Correction said the flu hadn't spread to other prisoners in the 13,200-convict system.
The Rikers Island prisoner - whose name or reason for being in custody wasn't released - was improving since his hospitalization Wednesday and wasn't in serious condition, Correction Department spokesman Stephen Morello said.
Morello said the prisoner came into contact with about 70 other prisoners in two housing units at the centre and all had been examined and none came down with the flu.
The jail cancelled weekend visits for those prisoners and advised any others' family members who were feeling ill not to come, he said. Surgical masks were passed out to those prisoners and officers at the two housing units; hand sanitizer was given to everyone in the jails, he said.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 4,700 confirmed and probable cases have been reported in 46 U.S. states, plus the District of Columbia. Five people have died in the United States, all with underlying ailments.
Internationally, Malaysia, India and Turkey have reported their first cases, all involving people who had travelled from the United States. They are in addition to the 36 other countries where the World Health Organization says more than 8,000 cases of the disease have been confirmed.
The assistant principal in New York, Mitchell Wiener, worked at one of six schools that have been closed for a week because of the latest rash of suspected swine flu cases.
Wiener's wife, Bonnie, said he had been feverish and sick for nearly a week before his intermediate school shut down. Wiener's son, Adam, said his father began "hallucinating and wasn't coherent" on Wednesday before he was rushed to a hospital.
City health officials are tracking schools with high absence rates. A spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, Ron Davis, said it received reports from 18 other schools of high student absences and had forwarded the information to the city's health department.
Spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti said the health department was "continuing to monitor the influenza-like symptoms in all schools throughout the city and will evaluate on a case-by-case basis."
In Turkey, health officials said the virus was detected in a man and his mother who had travelled to Istanbul from the United States. The Health Ministry said the two had arrived Thursday in Istanbul via Amsterdam were travelling to Iraq.
Thermal cameras at the Istanbul airport detected a high fever in the man and he was put under observation at Istanbul's Haseki hospital along with five other family members.
A lab later detected the H1N1 virus, the formal name for swine flu, in the man and his mother. Four other family members did not have the virus, the ministry said.
Japan on Saturday confirmed its first case of swine flu caught within the country, showing the effort to block the flu at the island country's borders had failed.
The government ordered schools closed in parts of the port city Kobe, where the Ministry of Health said a male high school student who had not recently travelled abroad tested positive for the virus. Two other students at the same school were suspected of having the virus.
The latest confirmed case is Japan's fifth overall. The first four - three high school students and a teacher - had recently returned from a school trip to Canada.
Mexico said tests have confirmed two more deaths from swine flu, bringing the country's toll to 68. Health officials say tests confirmed 207 more cases for a total of 3,102, including the deaths.
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