Mainland China has confirmed its first case of the new H1N1 flu strain and quarantined 130 passengers who had travelled with the man who tested positive.
The patient, surnamed Bao, is a 30-year-old student and is in a stable condition, China's centre for disease control said on Monday.
He is being treated at a specialist hospital in Chengdu, the capital of China's southwestern Sichuan province, after testing positive for Type A H1N1 influenza.
MOSCOW, May 8 (RIA Novosti) - Samples of the A/H1N1 swine flu virus have been delivered from the United States to Russia where scientists will conduct tests and develop a vaccine.
"Yes, the strain sample was sent yesterday from Atlanta...The plane must have arrived," a source in a medical institute involved in the research said.
A spokesman for the Epidemiology Central Research Institute said on Thursday that Russian scientists had developed tests to detect the A/H1N1 virus.
The head of Russia's Flu Research Institute, Oleg Kiselyov, said last week the scientists could create a vaccine to combat swine flu in three months.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that there had been 2,371 confirmed A/H1N1 cases in 24 countries, with a death toll of 44.
In Mexico, the number of swine flu cases has been put at 1,112, with 42 dead. Two people have died in the United States, where officials confirmed 952 cases.
No swine flu cases have been reported in Russia.
A study published today in the journal Science concludes:
While substantial uncertainty remains, clinical severity [of the current swine flu] appears less than that seen in 1918 but comparable with that seen in 1957.
The 1957 flu killed about 2 million people, which is between four and eight times more deadly than a typical seasonal flu epidemic which cause between 250,000 to 500,000 deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.
The 1918 flu killed between 50 to 100 million people.
[from George Washington's blog]
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