The worldwide tally for the fast-spreading swine flu, or H1N1 influenza, virus reached 592 cases in 14 countries, government officials said Friday.
A Mexican tourist visiting Hong Kong was diagnosed with the H1N1 strain of flu Friday and has been isolated in a hospital there in stable condition. This is the first case of the strain in Asia.
France reported its first two confirmed cases of swine flu on Friday.
Speaking on TF1 television, French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said the patients, a 49-year-old man and a 24-year-old woman, both recently returned from Mexico. They have been hospitalized at two Paris hospitals and are "doing well," she said.
Bachelot also said another patient hospitalized at a third Paris hospital likely has the virus, but it has not been officially confirmed yet. Bachelot said all three had received anti-viral treatments.
She said the "form (of the virus) in our country appears benign" but did not rule out that the French cases could prove more serious. "This virus has killed (people) in Mexico. ... Therefore we must take all necessary precautions."
In the United States, President Obama closed out a meeting with cabinet members that was devoted to swine flu, saying it was not clear that the swine flu was any more serious than any other form of flu, but added that federal agencies were preparing for the worst. Even if the new flu "is relatively mild on the front end, it could come back in a more virulent form during the actual flu season," the president said.
He added, "I'm optimistic that we're going to be able to manage this effectively."
Schools across the country continued to close because of concerns over actual or suspected cases. About 433 schools were closed as of Friday, affecting as many as 250,000 student in Texas, Alabama, New York, California, South Carolina, Connecticut, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Washington state, Michigan, Maine and Maryland.
A flight from Germany to Washington was diverted to Boston because a passenger complained of flu-like symptoms.
Airport spokesman Phil Orlandella says United Airlines Flight 903 was being diverted Friday afternoon after a 53-year-old female passenger told flight attendants about her symptoms. He said the flight from Munich had 245 passengers and six crewmembers. The flight had been scheduled to land at Washington Dulles International Airport later Friday.
It isn't yet clear what caused the woman's symptoms or whether she might be suffering from swine flu.
Still, the flu was beginning to look a little less ominous. New York City officials reported Friday that the virus still has not spread beyond a few schools.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the illness so far had proven to be "a relatively minor annoyance." City health officials said they have found few signs that the local outbreak of swine flu is spreading beyond a few pockets or getting more dangerous. The city has 50 cases, the most of any city in the United States.
Meanwhile, prescriptions for antiviral, flu-fighting drugs increased nine-fold on Monday compared to daily sales for the previous month, according to the healthcare information company SDI. Sales began to go up on Friday, April 24, the day after the CDC reported cases of the H1N1 influenza in the United States. They have remained high since then, SDI reports.
Clinics and hospital emergency rooms in New York, California and some other states are seeing a surge in patients with coughs and sneezes that might have been ignored before the outbreak.
The World Health Organization is working on creating a vaccine against the H1N1 viru, says Marie-Paul Kieny, WHO's Director of the Initiative for Vaccine Research.
"Vaccines are an extremely effective protection against influenza," she says. In the case of seasonal influenza, vaccines protect millions of people each year against death.
Therefore, it is "critically important" to create a vaccine against the H1N1 virus, she says.
However, that takes time. Testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that the flu virus for next year's seasonal influenza, which is currently in the early stages of production, does not provide protection against this newly-evolved strain.
Creating a new flu vaccine from scratch will take between four to six months and there's really no way to speed up the process and still make it safe and ensure the vaccine is effective, Kieny says.
"We think 600 million doses is achievable in a six-month time frame" from that fall start, Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Craig Vanderwagen told lawmakers.
"I don't want anybody to have false expectations. The science is challenging here," Vanderwagen told reporters. "Production can be done, robust production capacity is there. It's a question of can we get the science worked on the specifics of this vaccine."
Worldwide, the number of confirmed cases reached 592, according to the Associated Press, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control, WHO and government officials. Officially, the WHO lists the worldwide count of confirmed swine flu cases at 331.
In the U.S., the confirmed number of swine flu cases has topped 100. The CDC confirms 109, and states are confirming another 23.. Cases now are confirmed in New York, Texas, California, South Carolina, Kansas, Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, Maine, Colorado, Georgia and Minnesota.
A survey by the Harvard Opinion Research Program at the Harvard School of Public Health shows Americans appear to be responding to calls to increase hand washing. Fifty-nine percent of Americans said they were washing their hands or using hand sanitizer more frequently.
Despite public health officials' messages that only people who are sick with flu-like symptoms need to stay home, 15% of Americans said they were avoiding areas where many people are gathered, such as sporting events, malls or public transportation.
Other responses include 8% who said they were wearing face masks; 4% who have kept children home from school or daycare; and 1% who said they were getting a prescription for antiviral medications.
In terms of transmission, 13% of Americans believed, incorrectly, that it is possible to get the H1N1 virus or swine flu, from eating pork.
Some public health officials have begun to call the virus by its more official scientific name, H1N1, because of concern that the public will mistakenly believe that its common name, swine flu, means it can be transmitted by eating pork. It was actually called swine flu because the virus originally came from pigs, but has now mutated into a form that passes easily between people with no pigs involved.
However the change has not yet spread widely in public awareness, the survey found. A majority of Americans, 55%, have not heard of the term "H1N1" virus and only one in five thought it meant the same thing as swine flu.
The survey was conducted on Wednesday, April 29, on a representative national sample of 1,067 adults. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.
In global news:
No new deaths from swine flu were reported overnight in Mexico's capital for the first time since the emergency was declared a week ago, said Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.
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