GENEVA - The World Health Organization told its member nations it was declaring a swine flu pandemic Thursday — the first global flu epidemic in 41 years — as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.

In a statement sent to member countries, WHO said it decided to raise the pandemic warning level from phase 5 to 6 — its highest alert — after holding an emergency meeting on swine flu with its experts.

The long-awaited pandemic decision is scientific confirmation that a new flu virus has emerged and is quickly circling the globe. It will trigger drugmakers to speed up production of a swine flu vaccine and prompt governments to devote more money toward efforts to contain the virus

AP 5/21/2009 U.S. swine flu deaths hit double digits

Cases confirmed in Tokyo as new disease continues to spread around globe

SALT LAKE CITY - Swine flu forced Christina Huitron to make a choice no mother should ever have to make.

On Wednesday she told doctors to take her 21-year-old son off life support, making Marcos Sanchez the nation’s 10th fatality associated with the newly discovered virus that continues to spread across the globe.

“I knew he was suffering,” Christina Huitron told KSL-TV. “I don’t know how he was feeling, but I just knew I had to do it because he was passing away slowly anyways, and I didn’t want him to suffer anymore.”

Sanchez checked into a suburban hospital Saturday, vomiting blood and burning with fever, Huitron told The Salt Lake Tribune. By Tuesday he was suffering from multiple organ failure.

Dr. David Sundwall, executive director of the Utah Department of Health, said Marcos, the state’s first swine flu fatality, was overweight and had chronic medical conditions, including respiratory problems, that put him at risk.

“This is not a person who was overall genuinely healthy,” Sundwall said.

Sanchez had not traveled recently. Dagmar Vitek, medical director for the Salt Lake Valley Health Department, said an investigation to determine how he contracted the virus was under way.

In neighboring Arizona, health officials said Wednesday a 13-year-old boy from Tucson also has died with swine flu. The teenager died Friday of complications from the flu. He had been hospitalized May 10.

Arizona Department of Health Services spokeswoman Patti Woodcock said an older sibling of the teen is hospitalized with the virus, while other family members have recovered.

Swine flu has sickened more than 11,000 people in 41 countries and killed 85, according to the World Health Organization, whose figures often trail those of individual countries. Mexico has reported 75 deaths, the U.S. 10, and one in both Canada and Costa Rica.

Closing schools
In New York City, officials, colleagues, friends and family gathered Wednesday at a funeral home to remember Mitchell Wiener, an 55-year-old assistant principal who died of swine flu Sunday.

“Whenever I needed help, I used to always go to him,” student Jeffery Grey told reporters outside the funeral home. “I really don’t know who to go to now when I need help.”

Two more New York City public schools closed because of swine flu, bringing the number of city public and private schools shuttered within the last week to 23. One school closed Thursday across the Hudson River in Fort Lee, N.J., another closed in Reno, Nev., and four schools closed in Lodi, Wis., after students were sickened.

Judy Davis, a spokeswoman for the Washoe County District Health Department in Nevada, said state, county and school officials agreed that closing Mendive Middle School in Sparks was “best course of action” to prevent further spread of the flu after five students were sickened and one was hospitalized.

But experts said closing schools once students were already ill would do little to halt the virus’ seemingly inexorable spread.

“As a disease containment measure, it is not likely to be effective,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, associate director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Disease reaches Tokyo
In Japan, two high school girls who recently visited New York for a Model United Nations Conference became Tokyo's first confirmed cases. Japan had 280 total confirmed cases as of Thursday afternoon, making it the world's fourth-most infected country, behind Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.

AP Japanese students wear facial masks as a precaution against swine flu while touring the Senso-ji temple area, one of tourists destinations in downtown Tokyo on Thursday, a day after a 16-year-old girl in Tokyo was confirmed to have swine flu — the first case in the Japanese capitol.

While Japan's Health and Welfare Minister Yoichi Masuzoe urged citizens to remain calm, Egypt's health minister warned that Egyptians who perform the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca risk being quarantined upon their return.

"It is my job to warn," Hatem el-Gabali said. "I can also open the quarantine and say no one will return to their homes after arriving from Saudi Arabia."

Egyptian officials already have ordered that the country's roughly 300,000 pigs be killed as a preventive measure and have finished off about a third of the job in a couple of weeks.

Other diseases neglected?
In Geneva, health campaigners and officials from some poorer nations complained this year's World Health Assembly was neglecting diseases killing millions of people all over the world because of swine flu fears.

"Malaria, drug-resistant tuberculosis — they are killing people every day," said Dr. Sam Zaramba, Uganda's chief medical officer. "If all the emphasis that has been put on swine flu had been put on malaria and TB, we would have made a bigger impact on health."

Discussions were postponed on fighting Chagas disease, a scourge in Latin American countries, and the first-ever WHO resolution addressing hepatitis was dropped from the meeting's agenda.

But WHO spokesman Thomas Abraham said the assembly was still taking on a "broad agenda" that went far beyond swine flu to deal with improving basic health care and tackling global killers like TB

MSNBC 4/30/09- CDC: Swine flu cases top 100 in U.S.

Infections expected to rise as virus spreads to ‘many more states’

Health officials on Thursday stressed people with flulike symptoms should avoid public transportation but said everyone else needs only to follow commonsense precautions, as the nation's swine flu cases passed 100, reaching 15 states.
“There’s no one action that’s going to stop this, there’s no silver bullet,” Dr. Richard Besser, acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing Thursday.
But many actions, taken together, could lessen impact of the flu, he said. Besser couldn't comment whether the virus is changing to become more virulent as it moves from to person to person.

The Obama administration stood solidly against closing the U.S.-Mexico border, with Vice President Joe Biden calling it "a monumental undertaking" that would do little good.

Authorities said with the virus already in multiple states — including South Carolina, with 10 confirmed cases — closing the border now would be, as President Barack Obama put it Wednesday night, "akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out."

The CDC and officials in several states have confirmed at least 116 cases. They are in New York, Texas, California, South Carolina and scattered cases in Arizona, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Minnesota, Colorado, Georgia and Maine.

Member of U.S. delegation to Mexico ill
A member of the U.S. delegation that helped prepare Energy Secretary Steven Chu's trip to Mexico City has demonstrated flu-like symptoms and his family members have tested probable for swine flu.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that three members of an aide's family are being tested to see if they have the same strain of swine flu that is threatening to become a pandemic. The aide worked in presidential advance, which is responsible for planning and preparing trips.

Gibbs said that Secretary Chu has not experienced any symptoms. The spokesman also said that President Barack Obama also has had no symptoms of the virus and doctors see no need to conduct any tests on his health.

Also Thursday, a medical clinic in Everett, Wash., announced that a pediatrician who may have swine flu saw 22 patients — along with their parents or other adults — before she developed serious symptoms and went to the emergency room.

Dr. Yuan-Po Tu, medical director of The Everett Clinic, told a news conference that the pediatrician's husband and two children also became sick, but were doing well on antiviral treatment. Tu says the doctor, whose name hasn't been released, came to work Monday with what she thought were just seasonal allergy symptoms. She saw patients throughout the day but developed a fever that night and went to the emergency room, where she tested positive for what is assumed to be swine flu.

It's not clear where the pediatrician contracted the flu. She had not recently traveled out of the country.

100 school systems closed
Schools have been closed in roughly 100 school systems, and Seattle and Huntsville, Ala., joined the list Thursday as officials awaited word on whether some sick children had the infection.

Biden reiterated on Thursday advice the administration has been eagerly dispensing: "A parent whose child's school is closed out of a precaution or because there's been a confirmed case of flu should not take the child then to a day care center. They're going to have to take them home."

"And the hope is that the employers will be generous in terms of how they treat that employee's necessary action of taking that child home and not being at work," he said.

At a congressional hearing, Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sought to strike a balance: No one knows what the never-before-seen virus ultimately will do, but so far in most U.S. cases people are recovering without even needing a doctor's care. The big message is to try not to spread infection.

"This is a time when we don't want the worried well flooding the emergency rooms," she said. "At no time in our nation's history have we been more prepared to face this kind of challenge."

Biden accused of fearmongering
The vice president also was asked whether he would advise his own family against flying to Mexico and gave a surprise answer: "I would tell members of my family — and I have — that I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," he said. "It's not just going into Mexico. If you're any place in a confined aircraft and one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft."

Biden's office quickly issued a statement backing off the remarks and suggesting he was talking only about travel to Mexico, where the new virus has hit hardest, and urging people not to use public transportation while sick.

The airline and travel industries were quick to cry foul over Biden's remarks.

James May, president of the Air Transport Association, which represents airlines, sent Biden a letter expressing "extreme disappointment at your suggestion that people should avoid air travel."

American Airlines spokesman Tim Smith declined to comment directly on the vice president's remarks, but said, "To suggest that people not fly at this stage of things is a broad brush stroke bordering on fearmongering."

Lawmakers asked Schuchat about similar confined spaces, and she said there may have been a misstatement.

"If you're ill, you shouldn't get on an airplane or any public transport to travel," Schuchat said. "If you're sick, stay home. I can't tell you how many times I've said that this week."

She added, "I'm looking forward to getting on an airplane later today," to return to Atlanta, where the CDC is based.

Schools aren't the only focus. In California, dozens of Marines were under quarantine to see if they'll develop illness after contact with a comrade confirmed to have the new flu.

U.S. scientists are racing to develop the key vaccine ingredient — a strain of the virus engineered to trigger the immune system. But they cautioned again Thursday that it would take several months before enough doses could roll off assembly lines for the necessary testing in human volunteers.

The U.S. has reported the only death outside Mexico — a Mexican toddler who visited Texas with his family.

Biden was interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America," CBS's "The Early Show" and NBC's "Today" show and Besser appeared on ABC and CBS. Fauci was on the "Today" show.

Vaccine production months away
In Mexico, officials are urging citizens to to stay home for five days and is shutting down nonessential government services from Friday through Tuesday in hopes of containing the swine flu outbreak, which the World Health Organization warns is on the brink of becoming a global epidemic.

The steps were aimed at stopping further spread of the virus, blamed for 170 deaths in the country.

Besser said Thursday that the CDC is growing the virus that will be used to develop a vaccine against swine flu, although it hasn't been sent to manufacturers yet. Once in production it would take at least several months before a vaccine would be available for use.

Laboratory testing showed the new virus was treatable by the anti-flu drugs Tamiflu and Relenza. The government is shipping to states enough medication to treat 11 million people as a precaution. All states should get their share by May 3.

“We haven’t seen any change in our ability to use the current antivirals,” such as Tamiflu, Besser said.

No shortages had been reported — there was plenty in regular pharmacies, federal health officials said.

The disease is not spread by eating pork and U.S. officials appeared to go out of their way on Wednesday to not call the strain “swine flu.” Obama called the bug the “H1N1 virus,” and other administration officials followed his lead.

Obama noted he had asked Congress for $1.5 billion in emergency funds to help build more drug stockpiles and monitor future cases, as well as help international efforts to avoid a full-fledged pandemic, an epidemic that spreads widely across the globe.