Mysterious U.S. Swine Flu Probe Widens as Mexico Finds Swine Flu *updated*

Elderly and young banned from Hajj on H1N1 fears

Arab health ministers have agreed to ban certain people including the elderly and young children from pilgrimage to Mecca in an effort to contain the spread of swine flu.

"Hajj and Umrah will continue with some conditions," Ibrahim al-Kerdani, World Health Organisation spokesman in Egypt said after a meeting of Arab health ministers in Cairo on Wednesday.

"Some groups will be excluded from Hajj: people over the age of 65, people under the age of 12 and people with chronic illnesses," he told reporters.

The decision to keep the vulnerable groups away from the pilgrimage is yet to be ratified by the health ministers' governments, he said.
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Cincinnati Children's Hospital announced Wednesday it is one of only eight centers nationwide that will be taking part in the testing of two experimental vaccines to protect against the H1N1 Virus, also known as the swine flu.

Children's will serve as a vaccine and treatment evaluation unit.

The hospital is recruiting healthy, adult volunteers to test the vaccines in the beginning of August.

The information from these studies will help public health officials develop recommendations for immunization schedules, including dosage and number of doses for age and risk groups.

Health officials say the trials are being conducted in a compressed time frame in a race against a fall resurgence of the virus. www.wcpo.com...

Geneva » Some Muslim countries are advising pregnant women not to attend the hajj pilgrimage. China is quarantining any visitor suspected of having a fever, while priests in New Zealand have been banned from placing Communion wafers on worshippers' tongues.

It's all part of a global effort to slow the spread of H1N1 swine flu until a vaccine is ready, although experts are divided on whether the measures will work. www.sltrib.com...

Swine flu: church uses 400-year-old plague laws to avoid sharing of communion chalice www.telegraph.co.uk...

Meanwhile, Japan revealed Tuesday it had found a second such case of Tamiflu resistance, in a person who has no ties to the country's earlier reported case. The cases are the fourth and fifth globally since the new H1N1 virus was discovered in April. www.lethbridgeherald.com...

Emergency plans for virtual schools and "homework by post" have been drafted to set children work if a decision is taken to close schools over swine flu. news.bbc.co.uk...

Since the new flu virus was officially declared a pandemic on June 11, the disease has spread faster in six weeks than past pandemics had spread in six months. Virtually every nation in the world has been infected, with the U.S. alone — which has 263 confirmed deaths, more than any other country — estimated to have logged more than 1 million cases. Although the good news is that most H1N1/09 illnesses have been extremely mild, the rapidity of its spread — and the fact that young people seem to be especially vulnerable — still worries global health officials. "We don't know if it will actually ever completely go away," says David Butler Jones, the public health chief of Canada, which has been unusually hard-hit. "We're still seeing new cases, so nobody should let down their guard." www.time.com...

UK Plc only just managed to keep going during the snow storm earlier this year. Many organisations are using a home-working strategy to cope with the swine 'flu epidemic.

But the concern is that the reality of the swine 'flu epidemic will be worse than the snow storm. There will not be enough bandwidth to cope, due to contention ratios and exchange overload. www.computerweekly.com...

Seventh Manitoban dies of H1N1

Manitoba Health is reporting the death of an adult between the age of 18 and 65 who had a lab-confirmed positive test for H1N1 influenza and other underlying medical conditions.


They say this brings the total number of deaths associated with a lab-confirmed diagnosis of H1N1 influenza to seven in Manitoba.

Some 400 young recruits, some aged just six months, will then take part in a separate trial, due to start in about six weeks. news.scotsman.com...

THE swine flu pandemic could lead to a rise in cases of meningitis in the UK.

Meningitis Research Foundation urges people to remember that the early symptoms of meningitis and septicaemia are very similar to those of flu and not be complacent about other diseases during this pandemic. As cases of swine flu increase, meningitis cases may be missed.

People who feel unwell with fever, headache and flu-like symptoms are most likely to have flu, but it is important to know the symptoms of meningitis and septicaemia in case the illness gets worse.

Delayed diagnosis of meningitis coupled with the rapid progress of the disease can be fatal. Meningitis can kill in hours.

Influenza can make people more vulnerable to meningitis and septicaemia. Outbreaks of flu are typically followed by more cases of meningitis. www.chardandilminsternews.co.uk...

AFP - Forty-seven foreign teenagers, most of them Spanish, have been quarantined at a summer school south of Paris after testing positive for swine flu, the regional prefecture said Wednesday.

"They are mostly young Spaniards, aged 15 to 18," said Henri Welschinger, an official at La Salle Saint-Nicolas Catholic school in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where the group were staying on a language trip.

The 47 cases of A(H1N1) influenza have all been confirmed since Monday, the prefecture said. "None are in a worrying condition," Welschinger said, adding that the teens have been assigned to a single floor of the building.

"There is no reason to be worried. People behave as if it is the plague, but it is only the flu. We just need to take certain precautions," he added. www.france24.com...

The spread of the H1N1 swine flu is now unstoppable in Finland, says Minister of Social Affairs and Health Paula Risikko. She adds the aim now is to prevent possible complications and to treat serious cases and those belonging to risk groups.

”Containing the virus is no longer possible,” Risikko states. The government is likely to remove the virus from the list of generally hazardous communicable diseases at a meeting on Thursday.

Treatment of the virus will now be transferred from specialist hospital wards to health centres. They will concentrate on treating patients belonging to risk groups such as pregnant mothers, the long-term ill and small infants. yle.fi...

Argentine Health Minister Juan Manzur admitted that there is a "fear" growing among the Latin American countries for rich countries to monopolize the production of H1N1 vaccines.

"We want to be taken into account but we don't know if we'll get a guaranteed minimum amount of vaccines," Manzur told reporters in a press conference.

The Minister admitted that, together with his Latin-American colleagues, they "are afraid that rich countries will buy everything and let the countries with less buying power without vaccine. www.buenosairesherald.com...

Getting in on the trial would probably be a very good idea. The trial will be used to help pass it off as ok, if there is a problem it wont be with the trials.

OTTAWA — The Public Health Agency of Canada has no plan to deal with front-line health-care workers who refuse to be vaccinated against swine flu, a scenario that some infectious-disease experts believe could accelerate the spread of the flu pandemic in the coming months.

The question of whether doctors and nurses should be forced to take flu vaccines has long been a contentious issue in the public-health community. In 2002, the Ontario government withdrew legislation that made it mandatory for paramedics to get flu shots, after the paramedics' union launched a legal challenge under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The Canadian Medical Association, which represents tens of thousands of doctors nationwide, will introduce a resolution at its annual meeting next month that encourages physicians to get the swine-flu vaccine, which is expected to be ready in the fall. But the association will stop short of endorsing mandatory vaccinations, said CMA president Dr. Robert Ouellet. www.canada.com...

A senior immunologist told me privately yesterday that 70 per cent of the Australian population would end up getting swine flu.

The only reason the H1N1 pandemic seems to have faded lately, he says, is that most people are no longer being tested for it when they get sick; in fact the rate of infection is steadily getting worse, to the point where all investors and business people need to take notice and take precautions.

If the immunologist I spoke to is right, it would devastate many businesses and the economy generally, just as they are recovering from global financial crisis. In fact the impact could be worse than the GFC.

I haven’t seen any specific studies of the impact on the Australian economy, but two UK think-tanks have this week estimated the effect of a 50 per cent infection rate on the British economy: one said it would cause a 5 per cent contraction of GDP, the other 7.5 per cent.

Let’s say a 70 per cent infection rate for Australia is an exaggeration, and assume 50 per cent. The death rate from the H1N1 virus is about one or two in every 1000 infections. That means at least 10,000 people in this country would die.

An infectious diseases expert, Professor Raina McIntyre, who advises the government on influenza, said this month the numbers of deaths could reach 20,000. www.businessspectator.com.au...

The number of swine flu cases is rising rapidly and experts are warning in the worst-case scenario 30% - or one in three of the UK population - could become infected and up to 65,000 people could die this winter. news.bbc.co.uk...

The H1N1 swine flu scare, which cost Delta Air Lines as much as $150 million in the second quarter, also hurt the carrier's new nonstop Salt Lake City-to-Tokyo route.

"For Narita [International Airport], one of the issues [with the Salt Lake City launch last month] was the unfortunate timing of the H1N1 virus, and a lot of the traffic that we counted on to be on that flight was from Asia and Japan into the western U.S.," Glen Hauenstein, executive vice president of network planning and revenue management, said Wednesday.

"Unfortunately, that traffic has not materialized as a result of H1N1, and we are adjusting capacity from five times to four times weekly" beginning Sept.1, Hauenstein said during a second-quarter earnings conference with analysts and reporters.

Hauenstein said the lost flight will be restored if Delta sees fears about H1N1 recede "and the Japanese return to traveling." www.sltrib.com...

July 22 (Bloomberg) -- All Nippon Airways Co., Asia’s second-largest carrier by sales, had its biggest drop in international passengers in six years as a recession and concerns about swine flu slashed demand.

The Tokyo-based airline flew 20.1 percent fewer passengers overseas in June compared with a year earlier, it said in a statement today in Tokyo. It was the biggest decline since June 2003 when SARS curbed air travel.

Falling demand for business travel was exacerbated by swine flu cases, which soared to over 1,000 in Japan last month, leading schools and other organizations to cancel or delay trips. All Nippon Air forecasts sales will fall 3.1 percent in the year ending March 31. www.bloomberg.com...