By Catherine Bremer
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico started to get a better picture of its outbreak of a dangerous new flu strain on Friday, widening testing as a conveniently timed long holiday gave people a chance to ride out the epidemic at home.
Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said the public hospitals that treat roughly half the country admitted 46 patients with severe flu symptoms on Thursday, down from 212 patients on April 20.
"This is encouraging," Cordova told a news conference late on Thursday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent materials for a quick diagnostic test to Mexico so scientists there can quickly screen people for the new flu. The CDC's Dr. Richard Besser said test kits were also en route to health departments in all U.S. states to speed up surveillance.
Cordova said tests from samples sent to laboratories in the United States, Canada and Mexico have only confirmed 12 out of 176 deaths blamed on the H1N1 swine flu virus. "The number of confirmed fatalities will probably rise," he said.
He said that of 679 patient samples checked by the labs, 312 samples have tested positive for H1N1 swine flu, and 300 of those cases are patients who have survived, some after treatment with antiviral drugs.
Normal seasonal flu kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people around the globe in an average year, including about 36,000 in the United States.
Worldwide, 11 countries have reported confirmed cases of the H1N1 strain, with the Netherlands the latest to join the list and 17 more countries were checking possible cases.
MILD INFECTIONS
New confirmed cases were also reported in Canada, the United States and Europe. Almost all infections outside of Mexico have been mild and only a handful of patients have required hospital treatment, with one U.S. death.
The World Health Organisation said it would remain for now at its current alert level -- one step below full pandemic -- and that it would no longer refer to the H1N1 virus as "swine flu" to appease outraged meat producers. WHO did not offer another name, however, to distinguish the new virus from other circulating H1N1 viruses.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the United States would spend 169 million pounds to buy 13 million more courses of flu medicine. The United States began sending 400,000 doses of treatment to Mexico.
The U.S. government has stockpiled about 50 million courses of antiviral drugs and state stockpiles across the country include an additional 23 million courses. Both Roche AG's Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir, and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza, known generically as zanamivir, work against the new virus.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon asked Mexicans to stay home over the long Cinco de Mayo holiday beginning on Friday and urged businesses to close.
"There is no safer place than your own home to avoid being infected with the flu virus," Calderon said.
DRIVING SALES
U.S. retailers, however, counted on the outbreak to drive people to stores that have been abandoned in the global economic downturn.
"Sales are brisk for items such as hand sanitizers, anti-bacterial soap and protective masks and gloves," CVS Caremark Corp spokesman Mike DeAngelis said.
CVS said it was also seeing increased demand for the Tamiflu "particularly in markets where there are confirmed cases of H1N1 flu virus."
The Rite Aid Corp said Tamiflu and Relenza are available in about 98 percent of its nearly 4,900 stores, up from about 84 percent and said it was working with suppliers to keep replenishing its stock of face masks and hand sanitizers.
Similar increases in demand are being seen in Canada, according to spokesmen for Shoppers Drug Martchain and Wal-Mart Canada.
Mexico's peso was hammered on Thursday and its stock market slid.
"The information that we have at this stage is it is a relatively minor (economic) event," International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard said, although he warned that some countries and sectors could see fallout from the outbreak.
The WHO and flu experts say they 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.
But the first detailed analysis, published in the journal Eurosurveillance, showed it was a mixture related to two known swine viruses, one itself a triple mixture of bird, human and swine viruses.
"The closest relatives to the virus we have found are swine viruses," said Paul Rabadan of New York's Columbia University/ (Additional reporting by Helen Popper, Bill Berkrot, and Deborah Charles; Writing by Maggie Fox; Editing by Doina Chiacu)
