Swine flu developments

Alert level lowered in Mexico City

Mexican officials lowered their swine flu alert level in Mexico City, the capital, on Monday and said they will allow universities, cafes, museums and libraries to reopen this week. Mexican officials declared the epidemic to be waning at its epicenter, announcing that Wednesday will conclude a five-day closure of nonessential businesses they credit for reducing the spread of the new virus. President Felipe Calderon said that higher education classes would resume Thursday and all other schools and government-run day care centers would reopen by May 11.

Mexico angered over Chinese quarantine

Mexican officials angry about China’s decision to quarantine more than 70 Mexicans over swine flu fears sent a plane Monday to the communist country to bring its citizens back home. China sent its own plane to retrieve Chinese nationals stranded in Mexico.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon complained of a backlash against Mexicans abroad, and sent the chartered plane to fly to several cities and pick up Mexicans who wanted to leave China.

China’s Foreign Ministry denied Mexicans were singled out.

Late Monday, China sent a chartered flight to Mexico City to pick up 200 stranded Chinese nationals, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. China had earlier canceled the only direct flights between China and Mexico, a twice weekly service by Aeromexico.

A group of 25 Canadian university students and a professor also have been quarantined at a hotel in China since the weekend over swine flu fears.

Southern Hemisphere braces for epidemic

The Southern Hemisphere has been mostly spared in the swine flu epidemic. That could change soon as winter sets in with no vaccine in place, leaving half the planet out in the cold.

So far, the most affected nations have been in North America and Europe, which are heading into summer. But flu is spread more easily in the winter and it’s already sweater weather down south. Experts fear public health systems could be overwhelmed —- especially if swine flu and regular flu collide in major urban populations.

“You have this risk of an additional virus that could essentially cause two outbreaks at once,” Dr. Jon Andrus said at the Pan American Health Organization’s headquarters in Washington.

There’s also a chance that the two flus could collide and mutate into a new strain that is more contagious and dangerous.

A vaccine for swine flu is still months from being produced, and will likely be available just as flu season is ending in southern countries.

Close schools? CDC reconsiders advice

Federal health officials said Monday they were rethinking their advice that schools consider closing for as long as two weeks because of swine flu. That recommendation has already given an unscheduled vacation to about 330,000 children in at least 533 schools in about two dozen states, including Georgia.

Shutting down schools is intended to keep infections from spreading between students and then out into the community, said Dr. Richard Besser, acting chief of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. But in the cases of swine flu in schools, the virus was apparently already circulating in the community, he said.

One option would be to “really push hard on the personal responsibility,” Besser said, encouraging parents and teachers to look out for sick kids and insist they stay home if they’re sick.

Even the New York City school that was the epicenter of the nation’s outbreak reopened Monday after a mere weeklong shutdown. Students at St. Francis Preparatory School, a private Roman Catholic high school in Queens, had the largest swine flu outbreak in the country, with 45 confirmed cases.

No plans to raise pandemic alert level

Global health officials said there were no imminent plans to raise the pandemic alert level.

Raising the alert level to 6, the highest, would mean that a global outbreak of swine flu is under way. The World Health Organization uses the term pandemic to refer to geographic spread rather than severity. Pandemics aren’t necessarily deadly. The past two pandemics —- in 1957 and 1968 —- were relatively mild.

“We do not know how long we will have until we move to Phase 6,” said Margaret Chan, head of the WHO. “We are not there yet. ” WHO declares a level 5 alert when it believes a global outbreak is “imminent.”

Napolitano hopeful outbreak is slowing

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday she is “cautiously optimistic” that the swine flu outbreak may be winding down, at least for now.

A normal seasonal flu outbreak typically results in about 35,000 deaths in the United States each year, Napolitano said. And the current flu strain could resurface in one form or another when the traditional flu season begins this winter, she noted.

That said, “what the epidemiologists are seeing now with this particular strain of H1N1 … is that the severity of the disease —- how sick you get —- is not it’s not stronger than the regular seasonal flu,” Napolitano said.