First Swine Flu Death in the US Was a Baby in Texas
FEWW suspects that the young Texas victim was Hispanic. No further details have been released.
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The following news item was released by Reuters moments ago:
Texas baby first flu death reported outside Mexico
By Jason Lange
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – A baby in Texas became the first confirmed death outside Mexico on Wednesday from the new H1N1 flu strain.
A U.S. government official said a 23-month-old child in the southern state had died from the virus, which Germany said it had found in three cases — the eighth country to do so.
There were no further details about the death in the United States, most of whose 65 confirmed cases of swine flu have proved mild.
Nearly a week after the threat of a pandemic emerged in Mexico, that country remained the hardest hit, with up to 159 people killed.
France said it would seek on Thursday a European Union ban on all flights to Mexico because of the flu. The EU, like the United States and Canada, has already advised against nonessential travel to the popular tourist destination.
Cases have now been confirmed in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, Britain, Spain and, on Wednesday, Germany.
Germany’s infectious diseases agency found swine flu in a man and a woman in their late 30s in Bavaria, and a 22-year-old woman in Hamburg at the other end of the country, all of whom had recently returned from Mexico.
The World Health Organisation said it may raise its pandemic alert level to phase five — the second highest — if it was confirmed that infected people in at least two countries were spreading the new disease to other people in a sustained way.
Before the U.S. death was reported, Keiji Fukuda, acting WHO assistant director for health security and environment, said it could be a “very mild pandemic,” adding, however, that influenza “moves in ways we cannot predict.”
Stock markets in Asia and Europe rose on Wednesday, partly on optimism the world could be spared a major deadly pandemic.
(Reporting by Jason Lange, Catherine Bremer Alistair Bell and Helen Popper in Mexico City, Andrew Quinn in Washington and Eric Burroughs in Hong Kong; Writing by Andrew Marshall, edited by Richard Meares). Copyright Reuters
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