Posted on 04/25/2009 6:04:59 PM PDT by traumer
LONDON, April 25 (Reuters) - A British Airways cabin crew member was taken to a London hospital as a precaution after developing flu-like symptoms on a flight from Mexico City, the airline said on Saturday.
It was the first such reported precautionary measure in Britain since the emergence of a new flu strain that has killed up to 68 people in Mexico. It has also infected at least 11 people in the United States. The man has undergone tests, but the results are not expected back until at least Sunday. No other crew members or passengers on the BA242 flight into Heathrow airport were detained.
"He has flu-like symptoms and is responding well to treatment," a hospital spokesman said in a statement.
"The patient was admitted directly to a side room and the hospital is scrupulously following infection control procedures to ensure there is no risk to any other individual in the hospital."
A Health Protection Agency (HPA) spokesman said in a statement: "We are aware of a patient admitted to a London hospital with reported travel history to Mexico.
"As a precautionary measure the patient is being tested for a range of respiratory and other illnesses in line with UK health guidance.
"At present there have been no confirmed cases of human swine flu in the UK or anywhere in Europe."
The new flu strain -- a mixture of swine, human and avian flu viruses -- is still poorly understood and the situation is evolving quickly, the World Health Organisation said.
The HPA said it was working with the British government to review the situation in Mexico and any threat it may pose to public health in Britain.
(Excerpt) Read more at alertnet.org ...
Big answer for everybody on these flu threads ~ it takes a week and a day to determine what kind of flu virus, if any, just attacked you.
...Mexico sent 14 mucous samples to the CDC on 18 April and dispatched teams to hospitals looking for patients with severe flu or pneumonia-like symptoms. These teams noticed something strange: the flu was killing people aged 20 to 40. Flu victims are usually either infants or the elderly.
Bio-weapons, anyone?
I don’t know, but they’re saying that this virus is killing people between 20 and 40. That age group doesn’t normally succumb so easily to flu.
Could a flu virus be bio-engineered in such a way that it would be lethal to even the most hardy members of a population?
And could someone intentionally plant that virus among a population that is streaming unchecked into this country?
(tin foil hat/)
ping...
Isn't that the same age group that the Spanish Flu of WWI era killed mostly?
Yes. There's lots of data on some of the flu threads about why this happens. Apparently, a stronger immune system creates a stronger response to an attacking virus.
The problem with a communicable bioweapon or just a natural communicable disease is that you can't control the wind or the myriad numbers of possible persons who can be infected and pass it along.
The top of the hour news was saying Mexico only has enough of the effective antiviral agents to treat 1 million patients. Baxter (yes the same Baxter that just sent live viruses as "vaccine" that killed the patients) is working hard to make more of the antivirals. There's an interesting approach for an economic "stimulus".
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