Mexico City children wear masks as they enter their elementary school. Millions of children returned to class for the first time in two weeks. -- PHOTO: REUTERS
GENEVA - THE new H1N1 virus shows no signs of sustained person-to-person spread outside of North America and so has not yet tipped over into a pandemic, a top World Health Organization official said on Monday.
Dr Keiji Fukuda, acting WHO assistant director-general, also told a news briefing it was too early to say whether the swine flu virus would cause a pandemic.
CHINESE QUARANTINE
Chinese authorities were searching for 150 people who took the same flights as mainland China's first confirmed case of the new flu, state media said.
State television and the Xinhua news agency said the government had tracked down and quarantined about 150 people who flew with the 30-year-old man, first from Tokyo to Beijing and then from Beijing to the Sichuan provincial capital, Chengdu. But another 150 or so were unaccounted for.
'We remain at phase 5,' Dr Fukuda said, referring to the agency's second-highest pandemic alert level. 'It is still a confusing situation.' WHO said its laboratories have confirmed 4,379 infections with the new strain.
But the worst impact is still in North America, with 60 deaths. The United States alone has 2,600 cases.
'We know that we are seeing things change on an almost daily basis,' Dr Fukuda said. 'We are evaluating the clinical features, we are evaluating the epidemiology and the spread. We will continue to evaluate what is the impact on both people and countries.'
In Mexico, millions of children, many of them wearing surgical masks and clutching hand sanitiser, went back to classes for the first time in two weeks.
Mexican health officials said the death toll there has risen to 56 as results come in of tests on people who died in recent weeks. Mexico has had a total of 2,059 cases of the swine flu distributed throughout all but three of the country's 32 states, Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said.
An international team reported the virus appears to act like a pandemic strain, being more easily passed along than the regular seasonal flu.
Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London and colleagues reported in the journal Science that as many as 23,000 Mexicans were likely infected with the swine flu virus. -- REUTERS
