Amid signs that the H1N1 influenza outbreak in Mexico is waning, health authorities there said today that they are lowering the alert level and that they will begin allowing nonessential businesses to reopen, starting with restaurants on Wednesday. Museums, churches and libraries can open a day later.
University and high school students will resume classes on Thursday and those in lower grades next Monday, Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard told reporters after a meeting with President Felipe Calderon and the nation's 31 governors.
Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said no new deaths from H1N1 influenza had occurred since Wednesday and that the number of new patients was falling.
"I am optimistic about these findings," he told reporters during a morning briefing.
Nightclubs, movie theaters and sports stadiums will remain closed until the alert level is reduced further.
But U.S. officials said it would be premature to declare the problem under control. "I'm not ready to say that," Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on a morning television program.
But he noted that "what we are seeing is an illness that looks very much like seasonal flu. ... We're not seeing the type of severe disease that we were worrying about."
The number of confirmed cases worldwide has been increasing almost minute by minute, with the total now nearly 1,200. In the United States, 27 new confirmed cases in New York -- including 17 outside New York City -- brought the total to 321.
The World Health Organization sent mixed signals today. WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan, in an interview with a Spanish newspaper, implied that the agency would raise its infectious disease alert level to Phase 6, the highest possible.
Others, however, quickly reversed the message. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, addressing an informal session of the General Assembly, said, "If the situation remains as it is, WHO has no plan to raise the alert level to 6 at the moment."
At the WHO's daily news conference, Assistant Director-General Dr. Keiji Fukuda reaffirmed that. "We do not have any evidence that the virus has taken hold and led to community-level transmission in any other countries" other than in North America, he said.
Evidence of such sustained remission in a different region of the world is the principal criterion for raising the alert level.
Fukuda also stressed that raising the alert level means only that transmission has been observed and says nothing about the virulence of the new virus. "Those are two separate things," he said
Mexican officials continued to criticize the Chinese government for its restrictions on the movements of Mexican nationals. Arriving Mexicans are being taken into quarantine facilities, said Mexico's ambassador, Jorge Guajardo. That group includes the Mexican consul in Guangzhou, who was returning from a vacation in Cambodia.
Mexican authorities said they would send a plane to China to repatriate any Mexicans who wanted to return home. Meanwhile, Argentina said it would send a plane to Mexico for the same purpose.
Chinese officials also quarantined a group of 25 Canadian students and a professor from the University of Montreal over the weekend even though none of them displayed symptoms, according to a university spokeswoman.
Twenty countries have banned imports of pork from either Mexico, the United States or Canada -- or all three. Experts said the bans are beginning to put a dent in the global pork trade, which is worth $26 billion a year.
Health authorities continued to emphasize that there is no danger in importing or eating pork, despite the occurrence of a small outbreak of the flu in a herd of pigs in Alberta, Canada. That incident is believed to have been caused by a Canadian farmer who infected the pigs after his return from Mexico.
"It may be that pigs have more to fear from people than people have to fear from pigs," Besser said.
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