by EPSILON » Mon Apr 27, 2009 7:57 pm
The Scottish Health Secretary tonight announced that the deadly strain of swine flu has arrived in Britain. Nicola Sturgeon held a press conference tonight to confirm that the virus, which is blamed for more than 100 deaths in Mexico, has infected two people in Scotland.
“I can confirm that two suspected cases of swine flu in Scotland are positive,” she said. “But the threat to the public remains very low.”
There are now three patients being held in isolation in British hospitals, the two suspected cases in Scotland - two tourists who returned from Mexico last week - and a Canadian woman hospitalised on a visit to Manchester after displaying flu-like symptoms.
Ms Sturgeon said that seven of the 22 people who had been in contact with the two patients were displaying mild symptoms and had been advised to stay at home.
Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, earlier told the House of Commons that eight of the 25 people tested for the virus, were declared negative. Fourteen others were still under investigation, but had not been hospitalised.
The minister was talking as World Health Organisation experts met to decide whether to ratchet up the pandemic alert level for the outbreak, which is currently unchanged at level three of six.
Earlier Androulla Vassiliou, the EU Health Commissioner, advised all Europeans to delay all non-essential travel to Mexico or the United States, where there have been 40 confirmed cases of the new H1N1 virus so far - including 20 at one school in New York - but no deaths.
“This is obviously a cause for concern and requires a heightened state of alert. But it is not a cause for alarm,” President Obama told a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.
Europe's first confirmed case from the novel virus was a student who returned from a study trip to Mexico last Wednesday. He is being treated in an isolation ward of the Hospital General de Almansa in his home town of Albacete, in south east Spain.
The Spanish Health Minister, Trinidad Jiménez, said that about 20 other patients were under observation. "They are all stable, none of the cases is serious, not even that of the case confirmed," she said. "These are people who have recently been on trips to Mexico."
The virus has also spread to the US and Canada and other suspected cases are being monitored as far afield as Israel, Brazil and New Zealand.
The European Union’s Health Commissioner urged Europeans to postpone non-essential travel to the United States or Mexico because of the virus, while a top German holiday tour operator announced that it was suspending charter flights to Mexico City.
Ms Sturgeon earlier disclosed that Cauld Craw - a four-week civil contingency exercise involving hospitals, ambulance services and other agencies to prepare the country for an eventual flu pandemic had been delayed because of the swine flu outbreak.
As Spain confirmed its first case of the virus, Ms Jiménez said that it was "urgent and a priority" to share any information about possible cases with regions across the country.
Ten other suspected cases were found in Catalonia, three in Andalucía, one in Castilla-La Mancha, one in Navarre, one in Valencia, one in Aragón, one in the Basque Country and another in Madrid.
Spain has a large Mexican emigre population and there are many trade links between both countries.
Financial markets reacted nervously to news of the outbreak. Shares fell in Asia and Europe, with travel and leisure stocks such as Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways and British Airways down sharply, whereas makers of drugs and vaccines, such as Roche, were higher.
EU health ministers will meet later this week to discuss the outbreak, probably on Thursday. "There needs to be maximum European co-ordination," said David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary. "It’s important that we ... provide a clear set of running actions that can provide a degree of assurance and coordination that people need, that is something we are determined to do."
The new flu strain, a mixture of various swine, bird and human viruses, poses the biggest risk of a large-scale pandemic since avian flu surfaced in 1997, killing several hundred people. A 1968 "Hong Kong" flu pandemic killed about 1 million people globally.
Mr Johnson, the Health Secretary, told MPs that Britain had enough anti-viral medication in Government stocks to treat around half of the population. While drugs companies rush to create a vaccine to target the new strain, Mr Johnson said it was not yet clear whether existing stocks of seasonal vaccine would also provide immunity.
"The UK has been preparing for a flu pandemic for the last five years," Mr Johnson said. "We have established a stockpile of enough anti-virals to treat more than 33 million people, that is to say half of the UK population."
Britons arriving back from Mexico at Gatwick Airport told how they were questioned by a doctor on board about possible flu symptoms before they were allowed to leave the aircraft.
Trevor Cox, 65, from Dover, Kent, was among passengers arriving on the Thomson Airways 358 flight from Cancun after a two-week sunshine break with his wife Kathy.
He said: "I thought we might have problems this end with a screening process, but a doctor just came on board and asked if anyone was feeling ill or experiencing diarrhoea, then basically left it up to passengers. I think one or two people came forward.
"We first heard about the outbreak in our second week. We were flicking through the television channels and it cropped up on the news. I was a little bit concerned. I asked our rep out there and she said there was nothing to worry about. It has mostly been in Mexico City rather than where we were."
