Alberta girl hospitalized from swine flu as 10 mor

OTTAWA -- There are 10 new cases of swine flu in B.C. and a young Alberta girl has been hospitalized with a serious case of human swine flu in what appears to be the first time a more severe form of swine flu has appeared in Canada.

Three of the 10 new B.C. cases are students at Decker Lake Elementary school near Burns Lake which was closed because of the outbreak.

Ray LeMoigne, superintendent of the school district, said he was instructed late last night by the medical health officer for the region to close the school Monday, until further notice. LeMoigne does not know the names of the students, whether they or their family members recently travelled to Mexico, or whether they are all from the same family.

But he said several people from the community travelled to Mexico during Spring Break.

LeMoigne is hoping to get more information from public health authorities later today.

Meanwhile, Alberta Health announced Monday an Edmonton girl is in stable condition in hospital after contracting the disease, although it is not clear where she picked it up since she wasn't travelling.

Until now, all confirmed cases of human swine flu in Canada have been mild and not required hospitalization.

"We have one young girl that was admitted to one of our hospitals with a more severe form of illness," said Dr. Andre Corriveau, Alberta's chief medical officer of health.

She "is doing well under care in the hospital."

Canadian officials have warned they expect to see some severe illness from the disease as more cases are identified.

The case of the young girl who required hospitalization comes as Alberta identified six new infections from H1N1 influenza A Monday.

The province would not release her age or say if she is old enough to attend school. Health officials said they are not contemplating closing any schools in Alberta at this time and are investigating where she contracted the virus.

Canada now has 125 cases of human swine flu, including the 10 new cases in B.C. disclosed Monday that bring B.C.'s total to 39 cases. Nova Scotia reported five new cases Monday. P.E.I. reported two and New Brunswick just one.

On Monday, the World Health Organization said human swine flu appears to have a longer-than-normal incubation period, causes diarrhea in about half of those it infects and can lead to severe pneumonia and deaths in young, healthy people. But it's still not known how often it leads to severe disease.

The New Brunswick case, the province's second, involved a woman in her 40s from the Fredericton area who has already recovered. Both cases in P.E.I. were mild, according to the P.E.I. Department of Health. Neither case was hospitalized.

South of the border, the new H1N1 swine flu has now infected 286 people in 36 states, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Monday.

CDC officials have said they expect to see more cases as the flu spreads across the country. Most cases remain mild but a toddler, who was from Mexico, died in Texas last week. In Mexico, officials say they hope cases will continue to decline.

Globally, the largest number of cases has been reported in North America, from Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, although the virus appears to be on the move, with infections occurring in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

The World Health Organization is one step away from calling the swine flu outbreaks a pandemic. Last week it raised its alert level to phase five on a six-phase scale. The change was meant as a signal that a pandemic is likely imminent and that countries should activate their pandemic preparedness plans.

Officials said Monday they had no plans to go to phase 6. "We do not have any evidence that the virus has taken hold and led to community-level transmission in any other countries right now," Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's temporary assistant director-general for Health Security and the Environment, told reporters in a media call.

"We are not certain when we will go to phase six," Fukuda said. "There's not a timetable. There's no timetable for how viruses like this spread out."

Declaring a phase six pandemic only addresses the speed and ease with which people can get the disease, Fukuda said — it says nothing about the disease's severity.

"Phase six means that we are seeing continued spread of the virus to countries outside of one region," he said. "If you are seeing community outbreaks occur in multiple regions of the world, it really tells us that the virus has established itself and that we can expect to see disease in most countries in the world.

"Severity has to do with when people get infected, how often are they going to develop really severe disease? Will we see younger people develop serious disease more often than usual? Will there be anything unusual about pregnant women? Will there be anything unusual about children? These are the kinds of things we would be looking at in order to determine severity."

Twenty-five Universite de Montreal students, in China to study Mandarin, and their teacher have been placed under quarantine in northern China for seven days as a precaution against swine flu.

Provincial health authorities stopped the group Sunday upon their arrival in Changchun airport in the province of Jilin. They had their temperatures taken at the airport and then bused to a university dormitory. None of the students is reported to have fever.

Twenty countries worldwide had banned imports of pork as of Monday in response to the discovery of the new H1N1 flu strain in a herd of pigs on a central Alberta hog farm.

While the new H1N1 strain is not food-borne, fears that it may spread through animal products have prompted restrictions on live pigs, pork, cattle, poultry, livestock, feed and animal semen from countries with reported infections, according to WHO documents obtained by Reuters on Monday.

"We are very clear that pork and pork products when they're handled right and when they're cooked properly do not pose a risk of infection to people," Fukuda said. "Here, we are dealing with a situation where the people who are getting infected are not getting infected from pigs.

"However, we also want to be careful and make sure there is no risk . . ."

Federal officials believe the infected pigs on the central Alberta hog farm — the first known case of humans transferring the new strain into animals — contracted the virus from a Canadian worker who returned from Mexico on April 12 and arrived on the farm two days later, showing flu symptoms shortly thereafter. One other person on the farm has had mild symptoms. Officials are awaiting test results.

Both the worker and the approximately 220 infected pigs are recovering, but the animals have been quarantined, say officials.

Global trade in pork meat is worth about $26 billion a yea