MEXICO CITY: Mexico shut schools nationwide yesterday and warned the death toll from a swine flu epidemic believed to have killed 149 people would keep rising before it can be contained. The flu spread to Europe and the United States urged Americans not to travel to Mexico. The World Health Organization looked set to raise its pandemic alert level to Phase 4 or even to Phase 5, indicating the disease was spreading significantly among humans.
Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said 20 of the deaths have been confirmed to be from swine flu and the government was awaiting results on the other deaths.
“We are at the most critical moment of the epidemic. The number of cases will keep rising so we have to reinforce preventative measures,” Cordova said at a news conference that was briefly shaken by a 5.7 magnitude earthquake centered in southern Mexico.
Cordova said 1,995 people have been hospitalized with serious cases of pneumonia since the first case of swine flu was reported April 13. The government does not yet know how many were swine flu.
While the virus has so far killed no one outside Mexico, it has proved it can spread quickly between humans, raising fears that the world may be facing the flu pandemic that scientists say is long overdue.
The US government has already declared a public health emergency and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged caution over travel to Mexico, adding that Washington was taking the outbreak “very seriously.” The European Union urged citizens to avoid nonessential travel to the US and Mexico.
Spain became the first country in Europe to confirm a case of swine flu when a man who returned from a trip to Mexico last week was found to have the virus. But his condition, like that of 20 cases identified in the United States and six in Canada, was not serious. A New Zealand teacher and around a dozen students who recently returned from Mexico were also being treated as likely mild swine flu cases.
Oil prices fell more than 3 percent to below $50 a barrel as investors feared a new blow to an already fragile global economy if trade flows are curbed and manufacturing is hit.
Exploiting worries over the flu outbreak, spammers flooded the Internet yesterday with millions of e-mails peddling counterfeit drugs as remedies and seeking to steal credit card data, a Boston security firm said.
