Spread of swine flu far from over, officials warn

The Houston Chronicle

CANCUN, Mexico — World health experts warned Thursday that the global swine flu outbreak that so far has sickened nearly 4,000 Texans and killed 17 is all but certain to worsen in the coming months.

“We are really at the start of a global phenomenon,” said Keiji Fukuda, assistant director general of the World Health Organization. “This is a very humbling virus.”

Hundreds of specialists from 40 countries meeting at a posh beach side resort in this tourist mecca were plotting strategies for what many dread could become an outbreak rivaling a 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.

Health officials in the United States, Mexico and Canada fear that a strengthened virus will return north with the winter cold. And the United Kingdom’s health minister warned this week that the flu could strike as many as 100,000 Britons a day by the end of August.

“We need to plan for the most extreme scenarios as well as for the likely scenarios,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Influenza is perhaps the most unpredictable of infectious diseases.”

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Britain projects 100,000 swine flu cases per day

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is projecting more than 100,000 new cases a day of the H1N1 flu by the end of August and will change the way it deals with the virus, the government said Thursday.

"We could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August -- though I stress this is only a projection," health minister Andy Burnham told parliament.

He said the number of confirmed cases of the virus known as swine flu is doubling every week, putting pressure on health services.

"We have always known it would be impossible to contain the virus indefinitely and that at some point we would have to move away from containment to treating the increasing numbers falling ill," he said.

The World Health Organization declared on June 11 that the outbreak of the virus was a pandemic. More than 77,000 people have been infected worldwide.


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