Japanese boy left Malta before showing symptoms of swine flu - health authorities

A Japanese boy who contracted swine flu after holidaying in Malta left the island before he started showing symptoms, the Parliamentary Secretary for Community Care, Mario Galea said.

He said this evening that the six-year-old boy could not have infected anyone while on the island as one needed to have symptoms to be infective. But local authorities are still trying to determine if the boy, who was with his father and brother, stopped in other countries after leaving Malta.

The boy, the Parliamentary Secretary said, started showing symptoms of the disease seven days after leaving Malta. The possibility that he was infected while in Malta was extremely remote since there were no local cases of H1N1.

The boy was one of 30 confirmed cases of the H1N1 flu at a school in the western German city of Dusseldorf .

The World Health Organisation yesterday raised its pandemic alert level to the maximum of six. This is the first pandemic in 41 years.

The head of the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Department, Charmaine Gauci, said the authorities were extremely vigilant to be immediately alerted if the virus had to surface in Malta. But a handful of people whose symptoms were suspicious enough to deserve laboratory testing proved negative for the virus.

Swine flu is not considered a severe virus, and the reported deaths were mostly among people with underlying chronic conditions.

The flu originated in Mexico earlier this year and is completely different from avian influenza, which was until recently thought to cause the next influenza pandemic.

Health director general Ray Busuttil said that although swine flu was more severe than seasonal influenza, it was not very severe. While the infection rate was considered to be 25 percent, the same as for H5NI, the mortality rate was only of between two and three percent. This had been worked out at 50 to 60 percent for H5N1.

"We are erring on the side of caution," he said.

In the 24 hours up to 5 p.m. today, 294 new cases were registered in EU and European Free Trade Area countries. 29 cases were registered in other European states and there was the first death in Guatemala and the first cases in Morocco and the occupies Palestinian territories. The flu was in 26 European countries with 12 having less than 10 cases and 10 less than five.