Swine flu round up - May 12, 2009
All Nature’s swine flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.
The first Nordic nation to report swine flu is Finland. “There are 2 confirmed cases,” says Juhani Eskola, deputy director general at the National Institute for Health and Welfare (Reuters).
Thailand has also reported an H1N1 sufferer, although all these new cases are people recently returned from Mexico, reports PA.
In China authorities are now attempting to quarantine all passengers who were on a flight with the first case reported on the mainland. The Wall Street Journal reports:
About 120 of the 143 passengers on the flight from Tokyo have been contacted, including several dozen foreign nationals. So far, none are known to have symptoms, but the officials said they were "persuading them to take quarantine measures." It was unclear how many are already in quarantine.
If some of the more dire predictions come true, we may have cause to offer some rare praise for big pharma. Roche has announced that it is donating 5.65 million course of its antiviral Tamiflu to the WHO.
Finally, the journal Science has produced a rapid analysis of swine flu which is getting a lot of press. You can read Nature’s coverage here.
Image: Getty
