White House to hold high-level meeting

The White House said it would hold a high-level meeting next week bringing together top government officials to prepare for the possibility of a more severe outbreak of A(H1N1) flu.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will take part in the meeting at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland on Thursday.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that at least one million people in the United States have had swine flu, noting that many cases had not been reported to the authorities.

There have been roughly 287,000 confirmed cases of A(H1N1) flu in the US, around 3,000 people have been taken to hospital and 127 people are reported to have died, the CDC said.

The CDC arrived at its figure of one million cases based on computer models and surveys of communities known to havebeen hard hit by the new strain of A(H1N1) flu.