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| Posted: 02 May 2009 12:43 | ||
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Administrator Currently Offline |
Posts: 563 Join Date: Dec 2008 |
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South Korea has confirmed the country's first case of the H1N1 flu, making it the second Asian nation to report an outbreak of the deadly virus.
A 51-year-old woman has been in quarantine since returning from Mexico, Lee Jong-koo, chief of the state disease control centre, told a news conference on Saturday. Seoul's confirmation came as China quarantined hundreds of people in a Hong Kong hotel and cancelled all flights between the city of Shanghai and Mexico. A traveller who arrived in Hong Kong from Mexico via Shanghai has tested positive for H1N1 strain of the influenza virus. All passengers from the Mexicana airlines flight which brought the traveller to Shanghai will also be placed under "seven-day medical observation", China's health ministry said. It called on all passengers from that flight and another which took the Mexican patient from Shanghai to Hong Kong to get in touch with the health authorities "to ensure that all passengers can get timely medical tests". Health workers in white bodysuits patrolled the lobby of Metropark Hotel in Hong Kong on Saturday as guests picked up bottles of water, chocolate milk and bread before returning to their rooms. Police officers wearing masks guarded the building, which was cordoned off with police tape. 'Right direction' The virus is confirmed to have killed at least 16 people in Mexico, but officials estimate that as many as 101 people have died. Tests are still being carried out on the other 85 dead. On Friday, Mexico began a five-day shutdown of all but essential government services and private businesses in an attempt to halt the spread of the flu, but officials have suggested that the H1N1 outbreak may not be as severe as first feared. "This isn't to say we are lowering our guard or we think we no longer have problems," Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City, said on Friday after the first night in a week without any deaths. "But we're moving in the right direction." Jose Angel Cordova, Mexico's health minister, said that officials now believed there had been 397 cases of the disease confirmed so far, of which 381 sufferers had either fully recovered or were being treated. 'Running its course' Barack Obama, the US president, voiced hope that the virus may turn out to be no more harmful than the average seasonal flu. "It may turn out that H1N1 runs its course like ordinary flus, in which case we will have prepared and we won't need all these preparations," he said. Obama stressed that the government was still taking the outbreak, which has killed at least one person and affected at least 154 others in the US, very seriously. The spread of H1N1 to Asia came as France's health minister reported the country's first two confirmed cases of the virus and Denmark confirmed that one person had been infected. Germany earlier reported that a nurse living in Bavaria had been infected with the virus after contracting it from a patient who had been to Mexico. German officials said the nurse has since recovered. Germany's discovery was the second case of human-to-human transmission within a country other than Mexico after a case in Spain. Nancy Cox, influenza chief at the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said that it was positive that the genetic makeup of the virus did not show specific traits of the flu pandemic virus which killed up to 50 million people worldwide in 1918. "However, we know that there is a great deal that we do not understand about the virulence of the 1918 virus or other influenza viruses," she told The Associated Press news agency. However, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday that tests had shown that the vaccine against seasonal flu would have little effect against the new H1N1 strain. |
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