US confirms first swine flu death

The swine flu outbreak has resulted in the first death outside Mexico today – a 23-month-old child from Texas.

Three more cases were confirmed in the UK, adding to the two previously disclosed in Scotland.

A 12-year-old girl is among five people in the UK to have contracted swine flu after visiting Mexico, Gordon Brown told the Commons during prime minister's questions.

Two adults – one from Birmingham and one from London – are undergoing treatment.

More than 150 people are suspected to have died of the virus in Mexico and the illness has spread around the globe, but news of the first death outside the country where it originated will increase fears that a pandemic could develop.

The infant's death from swine flu in the US was confirmed by Dr Richard Besser, the acting director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. He gave no other details about the child.

America has confirmed 65 cases of swine flu, most of them mild, but Besser said more deaths were likely.

"Flu is a very serious infection and each virus is unique so it's hard to know what we're going to be seeing, but given what we've seen in Mexico we have expected that we would see more severe infections and we would see deaths," he said.

It was unclear if the girl had contracted the illness in Mexico, or been infected in the US.

Confirmation that infected people in two countries are spreading the new disease to their families or contacts in a sustained way would meet the World Health Organisation's (WHO) criteria for declaring a phase five alert on its scale of one to six. It raised the level to from three to four on Monday as the virus moved to Europe.

The WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told reporters yesterday: "If we have a confirmation from the United States or Canada, we could move to phase five."

In Britain the government is today preparing a mass information campaign that will see leaflets about swine flu delivered to every home in the UK, after the WHO called on all governments to prepare for a pandemic.

The Department of Health is in talks to "urgently increase" stockpiles of surgical face masks, to be used by doctors and nurses if infections spread more widely here.

More cases continued to emerge around the world today, with Austria announcing its first case, Germany confirming its first three and New Zealand announcing that the number of people suffering from the virus there had risen from 11 to 14 – including one patient who was not among a school group who recently returned from Mexico, the centre of the outbreak, but had come back from north America.

The WHO yesterday warned that it could be a disaster for poorer countries if the virus took hold across the globe.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, declared a state of emergency following the confirmation of 13 cases of the illness, and in New York there were fears the virus was showing signs of secondary transmission from children who had been in Mexico to others.

Today experts around the world will hold a telephone conference in an emergency review of the outbreak organised by the WHO to collect information on what is known about how the disease spreads, how it affects human health and how it can be treated. A report will be published shortly after the meeting ends.

In Mexico, authorities are carrying out a second round of stricter tests, which have so far confirmed that seven people have died of swine flu. Results are yet to be announced on a further 13 people who had previously been said to have definitely been killed by the illness. The virus is suspected in another 159 deaths and 2,498 cases of illness there.

The health secretary, José Córdova, last night said the death toll was "more or less stable" even as hospitals were swamped with people who think they have swine flu. Only 1,311 of those suspected of being infected remain in hospital, suggesting treatment works if medical care is sought quickly.

In New York, officials said 18 children from two schools were being tested for swine flu after showing symptoms, and the city's health commissioner said "many hundreds" more children who have fallen sick may be infected with the virus.

At least 10 countries around the world, including China and Russia, have introduced bans on the import of pork products, despite the WHO's insistence that the virus cannot be transmitted by eating pork.

Bavaria's health ministry today announced that Germany's first three cases of swine flu had been confirmed.The Robert Koch Institute said they were a 22-year-old woman being treated for flu-like symptoms in a Hamburg hospital after returning from a visit to Mexico, a man in his 30s being treated at a university in the southern city of Regensburg, and a 37-year-old woman from another southern town who recently travelled to Mexico.

New Zealand is waiting for test results on 44 possible cases, on top of those confirmed.

But while the latest confirmations were in developed nations, Dr Keiji Fukuda, the WHO assistant director general for health security, warned that the greatest threat is to the poorest countries: "We know from history … that the poorer countries are the ones who really get hit the hardest, they are really hit disproportionately hard, and they also have the least resources to deal with these kind of situations," he said.

Suspected infections are being investigated in Brazil, Guatemala and Peru, all countries that would struggle to cope with a large-scale swine flu outbreak