Mexico battles swine flu outbreak

Churches stood empty today in heavily Roman Catholic Mexico City after services were cancelled, and health workers screened airports and bus stations for people sickened by a new strain of swine flu that experts fear could become a global epidemic.

President Felipe Calderon has assumed new powers to isolate people infected with the deadly swine flu strain that Mexico’s health minister says has killed up to 81 people and left 1,324 others ill since April 13.

Mexican soldiers and health workers patrolled the capital’s underground system handing out surgical masks and looking for possible flu cases. People were advised to seek medical attention if they suffered from multiple symptoms - which include a fever of more than 100 degrees, body aches, coughing, a sore throat, respiratory congestion and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.

Hundreds of public events from concerts to sports matches to were called off to keep people from congregating and spreading the virus in crowds. Zoos were closed and visits to juvenile correction centres were suspended.

About a dozen federal police in blue surgical masks stood in front of Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral, which was nearly empty after a measure cancelling services to avoid large concentrations of people.

Markets and restaurants were nearly empty. And throngs of Mexicans – some with just a fever – rushed to hospitals.

Mexico appears to have lost valuable days or weeks in detecting the new flu strain, a combination of pig, bird and human viruses that humans may have no natural immunity to. Health officials have found cases in 16 Mexican states. Two dozen new suspected cases were reported in the capital yesterday alone.

Eleven cases of swine flu were confirmed in California, Texas and Kansas, with more suspected in New York City.

The first death was in southern Oaxaca state on April 13, but Mexico didn’t send the first of 14 mucous samples to the CDC until April 18, around the same time it dispatched health teams to hospitals looking for patients with severe flu or pnuemonia-like symptoms.

Those teams noticed something strange – the flu was killing people aged 20 to 40. Flu victims are usually either infants or the elderly. The Spanish flu pandemic, which killed at least 40 million people worldwide in 1918-19, also first struck otherwise healthy young adults.

The World Health Organisation yesterday asked all countries to step up reporting and surveillance of the disease, as airports around the world were screening travellers from Mexico for flu symptoms.

Today New Zealand reported that 10 students “likely” have swine flu after a school trip to Mexico, though Health Minister Tony Ryall said none of the students was seriously ill and there was no guarantee they had swine flu. Israel’s Health Ministry said there is one suspected case in that country and France is investigating four possible cases.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the outbreak of the never-before-seen virus has “pandemic potential.” But she said it is still too early to tell if it would become a pandemic – an epidemic that spreads in humans around the world.

WHO guidance calls for isolating the sick and blanketing everyone around them with anti-viral drugs such as Tamiflu. Too many patients have been identified in Mexico’s teeming capital for such a solution now. But some pandemic flu experts say it’s also too late to contain the disease to Mexico and the US.

Mexican authorities ordered schools closed in the capital and the states of Mexico and San Luis Potosi until May 6.

A team from the Centres for Disease Control was in Mexico to help set up detection testing for the swine flu strain, something Mexico previously lacked.

Health authorities noticed a threefold spike in flu cases in late March and early April, but thought it was a late rebound in the December-February flu season.