As far away as Hong Kong and Japan, health officials said they were stepping up surveillance of travelers for flu-like symptoms.
No countries or global bodies have issued travel alerts about Mexico, but a significant worsening of the flu outbreak could damage the tourism and retail sectors in an economy already hit hard by the global crisis.
MORE CASES COULD EMERGE
The WHO says the virus from 12 of the Mexican patients is genetically the same as a new strain of swine flu, designated H1N1, seen in eight people in California and Texas. All of the eight later recovered.
Experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working on a vaccine against the new strain but it could take months to make.
More cases could come to light as patients are tested in California, said Dr. Gil Chavez, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the California Department of Public Health and the state’s chief epidemiologist. “The more we look the more we are likely to find,” he said.
In New York City, health officials were looking into what had sickened scores of students who fell ill with flu-like symptoms in a Queens high school on Thursday and Friday, although the symptoms were reported as mild.
“At this point we have no evidence to say what’s going on in New York is related to this,” Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the CDC, told CNN.
Little can be done to prevent an outbreak of flu from spreading, health experts warn, but common sense measures can help people protect themselves. No. 1 is hand-washing.
In Hong Kong, the epicenter of the 2003 SARS epidemic and a city especially vigilant about any threat of infectious disease, the government said it was ramping up safety checks at airports and the border. Authorities have also said they would analyze flu samples in the territory.
Cordova said Mexico had 1 million doses of antiviral medicine, easily enough to treat the cases reported so far. Roche AG’s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza are both recommended to treat flu and have been shown to work against viral samples taken from the eight people infected in the United States.