WASHINGTON, May 10, (Agencies): A Washington state man with H1N1 influenza died last week, health officials said, the third US sufferer to die as the new flu strain confirmed in more than 2,200 Americans appeared in Japan and Australia. Health officials have warned that the true number of cases may be underestimated. Although most cases appear to be mild, the new swine flu strain has killed just as seasonal flu does. Another 48 people have died in Mexico and one each in Canada and Costa Rica. Washington state officials said on Saturday a man in his 30s with underlying heart conditions died last week, state governor Chris Gregoire describing his death as “a sobering reminder that influenza is serious”.

The virus has moved into the southern hemisphere, where influenza season is just beginning, and could mix with circulating seasonal flu viruses or the H5N1 avian influenza virus to create new strains, health officials said.
“One of the big challenges with influenza viruses is the way that they change, the way they combine and their prevalence in a number of species,” Dr Anne Schuchat of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told a news briefing on Saturday.
“This is why it is so important for countries to have a strong capacity to deal with influenza and also why it is very important to understand what happens at the interface between people and animals.”
Before the Washington man’s death was announced, the CDC reported 2,254 confirmed US cases of the virus with 104 people in hospital, up from 1,639 cases previously.
“Today there are almost 3,000 probable and confirmed cases here in the United States,” Schuchat said. “The good news is we are not seeing a rise above the epidemic threshold.”
Japan reported four cases, and globally WHO confirmed 4,379 people in 30 countries had been ill. Australia reported its first case, a woman who been travelling in the United States but officials said she had made full recovery.
“We think this virus is in most of the United States,” Schuchat said. “The individual numbers are likely to be a very great underestimate.”

More Americans are seeing doctors for influenza-like illnesses at a time of year when such visits usually decline.
Schuchat said tests showed they do not all have the new H1N1 virus. Many have seasonal flu — the H1N1 seasonal strain, the H3N2 seasonal strain and influenza B — and other infections.
Seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people globally and infects up to a third of the population each year.
Health experts have not openly criticized efforts by other countries to stop the virus from getting in — most notably China and its territory of Hong Kong, which have quarantined travellers in contact with patients.
A spokeswoman in Hong Kong said on Saturday that a Mexican traveller confirmed as Hong Kong’s first and only case of the new flu strain had been discharged from hospital.
The unidentified man, who unwittingly caused the confinement of almost 300 guests and staff at a Hong Kong hotel where he had stayed, had been in hospital for a week.
China put seven people who had been exposed to three Japanese passengers diagnosed with the H1N1 flu in quarantine, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the government as saying.
Mexican health ministry spokesman Carlos Olmos said the government was testing thousands of samples to confirm which patients with severe respiratory symptoms were actually infected with the flu.
He said more than 5,000 tests had been done on suspected cases and that 1,578 people were ill but were being treated.

After the virus was identified on April 23, Mexico banned public events and shut schools, bars, restaurants and many businesses to prevent people from gathering. Officials say disinfection of public spaces has helped control its spread.
Schools in the capital will reopen on Monday.
But the state government of Jalisco, home to Mexico’s second-largest city Guadalajara, said schools, nightclubs and theaters there will remain shut for another week after three suspected flu deaths.
Schuchat said it is not yet clear whether some measures taken have slowed the outbreak, but she said it was clear that early detection methods had alerted the world quickly.
She noted that the AIDS virus, which has now killed 25 million people globally and infects 33 million, spread for years before it was even identified.
“If we end up having a bad pandemic of influenza from this strain we would have had a real jump-start on things like vaccines,” she said.
China
A Chinese man returning from studying at a US university has become the first suspected case of swine flu in mainland China, the Health Ministry said Sunday.
The ministry identified the patient as a 30-year-old student surnamed Bao studying at an unspecified US school.
If confirmed, Bao’s case would be the first in the mainland and China’s second in the global outbreak. The Chinese territory of Hong Kong earlier reported a case of swine flu diagnosed in a 25-year-old Mexican who flew to the city via Shanghai.
The Health Ministry said in a statement on its website that Bao left St. Louis, Mo., Thursday, transited St. Paul, Minn., on a flight that went to Tokyo.
In Tokyo he took a Northwest Airlines flight to Beijing on Saturday and then got on a different plane to Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province, the ministry said.
Canada
The number of cases of swine flu confirmed in Canada rose to 281 on Saturday, after the country’s first A(H1N1) death was reported a day earlier in Alberta province.
There were four new cases reported in Alberta, while another 19 were confirmed in British Columbia. Ontario had 14 new reported cases and Quebec one.
Authorities said all the new cases reported Saturday were mild, like most of the cases to date in Canada.
A woman in her 30s from a remote area of western Alberta province was the first person to die from possible swine flu complications in Canada, health authorities said Friday.
So far there have been 56 cases confirmed in Nova Scotia; three on Prince Edward Island; two in New Brunswick; 16 in Quebec; and 76 in Ontario; one in Manitoba, two in Saskatchewan; 46 in Alberta and 79 in British Columbia.
Egypt
The kitschy Egyptian singer who found fame with the hit “I hate Israel” and who attacked America and Saddam Hussein in song over the Iraq war has traded politics for pigs — bemoaning swine flu as the next disaster threatening Egypt.
The middle-aged Shaaban Abdel-Rahim, a former laundryman who was somehow thrust into an unlikely singing career a decade ago, appeared on Egyptian TV last week to sing of the dangers of swine flu — even though no cases of the disease have been reported in Egypt.
Appearing on a prime-time current affairs program on May 3 in a glittering neon green suit and shiny red shirt and gently swiveling his rotund midsection, Abdel-Rahim crooned: “We have yet another disaster; the situation is dangerous; that’s all we needed — swine flu.”
He sings an uninspired melody on top of a generic Arabic pop beat like those heard blaring from Nile river party boats at night.
“It’s better for people to be healthy; to hell with the pigs; I hope they kill them, so people can feel safe; without police intervention and without strikes,” he sings.
Declaring that the illness threatens humanity, he sang with apparent dread, “It’s spread to two countries already — America and Mexico!”

Taiwan
Taiwan health officials said on Monday the island most probably had its first cases of influenza A, a 32-year-old mother and her baby from the city of Taipei who returned from the United States six days ago.
“We’re 90 percent sure that these are confirmed cases and we are just finalising our findings, which will be announced at 2 a.m. (1800 GMT). But we’re already treating them as confirmed cases,” Yeh Ching-chuan, minister of Taiwan’s Department of Health, told a late-night news conference.
Over the weekend, the United States said a Washington state man with the H1N1 influenza died last week, the third US sufferer to die as the new flu strain confirmed in more than 2,200 Americans appeared in Japan and Australia.
Another 48 people have died in Mexico and one each in Canada and Costa Rica.

France
Another case of swine flu has been confirmed in France, bringing the total number of people infected in the country to 13, health authorities said on Sunday.
Ten of the cases involved people who recently returned from Mexico, the epicentre of the global epidemic, two had just flown home from New York, and one from California, said the National Institute for Public Health Monitoring.
None of the cases were life-threatening, it added.
The death toll from swine flu has topped 50 as Costa Rica reported its first fatality from the virus and Japan and Norway joined a growing list of nations with confirmed cases.