Swine flu spreads in Japan ahead of WHO meeting

KOBE, Japan (AFP) - Japan’s number of confirmed swine flu cases soared to 93 at the weekend, officials said late Sunday, as senior health officials gathered in Geneva for talks on containing the spread of the virus.
Most of the infections were among high school and college students in and around the western cities of Kobe and Osaka, where authorities ordered more than 1,000 schools and kindergartens to stay shut on Monday.
“I don’t know specifics about the cases but judging from confirmed cases the infection is likely to be spreading to hundreds of people,” Japanese virologist Masato Tashiro told public broadcaster NHK.
“There must be a number of people who slipped through border controls (at airports) as their symptoms were quite light, passing the virus to other people before they knew it.”
Tashiro was speaking from Geneva, where the World Health Organization (WHO) annual assembly will begin on Monday, with fears about the global outbreak of A(H1N1) influenza expected to dominate discussions.
Nearly 8,500 people in 39 countries have been infected with swine flu, according to the latest figures released by the WHO. Cases confirmed in Turkey, India, Hong Kong, Britain and Chile at the weekend have not been included in the tally.
More than 70 people have died from the virus — all of them in the Americas and nearly all in Mexico, where the new strain of swine flu was first detected less than a month ago.
Hong Kong officials on Sunday confirmed the third case of swine flu in the city, a 23-year-old man who arrived from the United States a day ago.
Meanwhile 14 new cases were confirmed in Britain, 10 of them in London, pushing the total number of cases of the virus in the country over 100.
And a 32-year-old woman became Chile’s first confirmed swine flu case Sunday, hours after returning to the country on a flight from the Dominican Republic via Panama, health officials said.
Acting WHO Assistant Director General Keiji Fukuda has said that studies indicated a “significant number of people” had been infected but their cases were either still to be detected or confirmed by laboratory tests.