WASHINGTON: A Mexican toddler in Texas died yesterday of the swine flu virus, the first confirmed death outside Mexico, as the World Health Organization said the outbreak showed clear signs of spreading around the world. Nearly a week after the threat first emerged in Mexico, Spain reported the first case in Europe of swine flu in a person who had not been to Mexico, underscoring the threat of person-to-person transmission.
“It is clear that the virus is spreading and we don’t see evidence of it slowing down at this point,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, WHO acting assistant director general, told a news briefing.
With Germany and Austria reporting cases, bringing the ‘confirmed’ number of affected countries to nine, Fukuda said the WHO was moving closer to raising its pandemic alert to phase five, the second highest level possible. US officials said that a 22-month-old boy died in Texas — the first confirmed US swine flu death — but they added that he was on a family visit from Mexico, where up to 159 flu fatalities have been recorded.
Richard Besser, acting head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the country now had 91 confirmed cases in 10 states from New York to California.
“We’re going to find more cases. We’re going to find more severe cases and I expect that we’ll continue to see additional deaths,” Besser said.
US President Barack Obama, who on Tuesday asked for $1.5 billion in emergency funding to fight the disease, said the death showed it was time to take “utmost precautions” against the virus. Financial markets are keeping an eye on the spread of the virus, but so far the economic impact has largely been confined to the tourism and pharmaceutical industries.
Unless a significant number of deaths start to be reported from a number of countries, raising the possibility of an even slower recovery from recession, analysts predict the impact on stock, bond and currency prices is likely to be limited.
France said it would seek a European Union ban today on flights to Mexico. Argentina and Cuba have already stopped flights from Mexico.
The EU, the United States and Canada have advised against nonessential travel to the popular tourist destination, as nearly all the cases so far, in Canada, New Zealand, Israel and Spain, have been linked to travel from Mexico.
The WHO said there was no plan now to call an emergency committee meeting to raise the pandemic alert level, which could take place if it were confirmed that infected people in at least two countries were spreading the disease to other people in a sustained way.
The WHO’s Fukuda, who earlier said the outbreak may end up as a “very mild pandemic,” said the report of the Spanish case involving a person who had not been to Mexico suggests the virus is spreading more easily among people.
“There are cases which are occurring in people who have not traveled,” Fukuda told a news briefing. “What we are looking for overall is whether we see many kinds of those infections occurring that suggest transmission is occurring independent of travel.”
Spain’s El Mundo newspaper said the Spanish patient had recent contact with someone who had visited Mexico. The new strain contains genetic material from avian, swine and human viruses and appears to have evolved the ability to pass easily from one person to another.
It cannot be caught from eating pork products but Egypt ordered all its pigs to be slaughtered and some countries, led by Russia and China, have banned US pork imports.
The World Trade Organization said yesterday it had not been told officially of any such bans, and the EU and Japan said they would not follow suit.
In the US, where pork producers have voiced outrage over the trade bans, officials began referring to the outbreak as the 2009 H1N1 flu.
Meanwhile, health experts said swine fu could be especially dangerous for millions of people already battling other infections, such as HIV or tuberculosis.
WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in Geneva adults who suffered severe pneumonia and died from the virus in Mexico may in fact have fallen into this category.
“It is a question which a lot of our scientists have been looking at,” Hartl told reporters. “Maybe people were infected with other illnesses too that made their illness more severe. Maybe they were immunologically suppressed,” he said.
According to WHO estimates, there are 33 million people infected with immune-weakening HIV worldwide, and another 9 million people are diagnosed with tuberculosis every year, a disease that only rears its head when immunity levels are low. If swine flu infiltrates those communities, and takes hold in impoverished and densely-populated areas such as urban slums, where tropical and other diseases are rife, health experts expect the outbreak could quickly become more severe.
