Mexico encouraged by fall in new flu cases

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico started a five-day shutdown of most offices and businesses on Friday to try to halt the spread of a deadly flu strain, and officials said they were encouraged by signs that the number of new cases was falling.

Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said the public hospitals that treat roughly half the country admitted just 46 patients with severe flu symptoms on Thursday, down from 212 patients on April 20. "This is encouraging," he said.

Mexico, the worst-hit country, has reported 176 deaths from the new strain of the H1N1 virus.

Worldwide, 13 countries have confirmed cases. The latest were Denmark and Hong Kong -- where a traveller from Mexico accounted for the first verified case on the Asian continent.

The largest number of confirmed cases outside Mexico is in the United States, with 109. Almost all infections outside Mexico have been mild, and only a handful of patients have required hospital treatment.

Only one person has died outside Mexico: a toddler from Mexico who travelled to the United States.

The World Health Organisation says experts do not yet know enough about the new strain to say how deadly it is, how far it might spread and how long any potential pandemic may last.

It said on Friday that no meeting of its emergency committee was scheduled, meaning there was no immediate likelihood of its level 5 alert being raised to a full 'phase 6' pandemic alert.

To declare a full-blown pandemic, WHO would have to be convinced the new virus is spreading in a sustained way among communities in another region besides North America.

Although Spain has had one case of a traveller from Mexico infecting someone else, WHO spokesman Thomas Abraham said that "we need to be sure it is actually established in communities, not just stray cases of a traveller passing it on to one person or two people."

Germany also reported that a nurse there had caught the virus from treating a man who had recently come from Mexico.

NOT "SWINE FLU"

The WHO said on Thursday it would call the new virus strain Influenza A (H1N1), not "swine flu," to appease outraged meat producers, since there is no evidence that pigs have the virus or can transmit it to humans.

Mexico's peso was hammered on Thursday and its stock market slid. But most global markets were taking the flu news in their stride as traders focussed on hopes that a deep U.S. recession may be nearing an end.

"The information that we have at this stage is it is a relatively minor (economic) event," International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard said.

Some countries and sectors will suffer, however, not least Mexico. HSBC estimated that every week of the crisis could chop 0.3 percent off Mexico's annual economic output.

Continental Airlines Inc of the United States said it was halving its seat capacity to Mexico from Monday because of lower demand.

Both Roche AG's Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir, and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, known as zanamivir, have been shown to work against the new virus.

The United States has begun sending 400,000 doses of treatment to Mexico. But Greece, which has not reported any cases of the new virus yet, banned the export of Relenza and Tamiflu.

MEXICO STAYS HOME

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has asked Mexicans to stay home from May 1 to 5 over the long Cinco de Mayo holiday, and urged businesses to close. The streets of the capital were much quieter than usual.

"There is no safer place than your own home to avoid being infected with the flu virus," Calderon said. [nN29466276]

Measuring the spread of the new flu has been difficult because of the lack of diagnostic facilities in Mexico.

Of Mexico's 176 presumed H1N1 deaths, only around a dozen have been confirmed, at laboratories in the United States or Canada. Almost a third of the bodies were buried before proper tests could be carried out.

But a lab equipped with kits specifically designed to test quickly for the new strain has now been set up in Mexico, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

John Tam, a U.S.-based clinician who worked on the 2003 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, said he expected the fatality rate, which is dramatically higher in Mexico than anywhere else, to decrease as "more milder cases are being correctly identified."

(Additional reporting by Helen Popper, Bill Berkrot, and Deborah Charles; Writing by Maggie Fox, Andrew Marshall and Kevin Liffey; Editing by Richard Balmforth)