Swine flu scare traps ship passengers

A 15-year-old Melbourne boy has become Australia's latest swine flu case, while
almost 3,000 passengers and crew on a cruise ship were quarantined for several hours
in Sydney because of a swine flu scare.
Almost 2,000 passengers, and another 900 crew, were kept on the Dawn Princess for
more than five hours after it arrived in Sydney at noon on Saturday, while another
2,000 passengers waiting to board were left to wait on the dock.
They have now been allowed to leave the ship but have been told to remain in
isolation in Sydney until testing of four passengers with mild influenza-like
symptoms has been completed.
"Passengers and crew have now disembarked the ship, have been provided with fact
sheets and instructed to stay in isolation until tests results are known," NSW chief
health officer Kerry Chant said.
Two passengers who tested positive for influenza-A during the trip had recovered 10
days ago, Princess Cruises spokeswoman Sandy Olsen said, but the ship authorities
were required to report the cases.
Ms Olsen said the death of a passenger on board the ship was cardiac-related.
A second passenger was taken by ambulance to a Sydney hospital but they were not
suffering from any respiratory illness.
Victorian health authorities confirmed Australia's 14th swine flu case, and the
state's ninth, on Saturday, with a 15-year-old boy from Melbourne's northern suburbs
diagnosed with the H1N1 virus.
Twenty-five classmates of the year nine student from Mill Park Secondary College in
Melbourne's outer north have been put into home quarantine and given antiviral
drugs.
The group were believed to have had "prolonged contact" longer than four hours last
week, a spokesman for Victoria's Health Minister Daniel Andrews told AAP.
"We asked them to go into one week home quarantine," the spokesman said.
The boy is also in home quarantine with his parents and two siblings.
On its school website, Mill Park Secondary posted a message saying the boy had had
only minimal contact with other students outside his classes while he was
infectious.
"For this reason, (Department of Human Services) has advised that no widespread
action needs to be taken across the entire school at this time, but the situation
will remain under review," the website said.
Health authorities are continuing to investigate how the boy, the latest
community-acquired case, contracted the disease.
"He, like a number of the other cases we spoke about yesterday, has no travel
history or any link to anyone else who has a travel history," Mr Andrews told
reporters in Melbourne.
The boy had also had no known contact with the other eight confirmed cases in the
state.
Victoria's acting chief health officer Rosemary Lester said health authorities
always knew there would be cases in the community.
"We would not say that we've lost control of this however we have always said that
it would be very difficult to prevent further cases occurring in the community," she
told reporters in Melbourne.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admitted Friday's decision to lift the flu alert level
from delay to contain, which allows authorities to close schools if students are at
risk, would be disruptive but necessary.
"This will of course involve inconvenience to communities as certain schools are
temporarily closed down," he told reporters in Sydney.
"However, we also have the responsibility for the public health of the nation and
therefore we will take whatever actions are necessary to underpin the public health
of the nation."
Mr Rudd said the government would continue to maintain the "closest possible
dialogue" between Australia's chief medical officer Jim Bishop and his state and
territory counterparts.
"As anything further emerges on this front we will act appropriately and act
decisively."
The government has previously ensured the nation had a "substantial stock" of
antivirals, he said.
Professor Bishop said that unlike the more severe cases experienced in some other
countries, the Australian cases have tended to last only three to four days "and
people aren't particularly ill with it".
"It is however a spectrum of disease which we've mainly seen the mild end," Prof
Bishop told reporters in Canberra.
"But the overseas information would be there's both a mild end and a nasty end and
the nasty end relates to certain types of people which are at certain types of
risk."
Those tended to be younger people, pregnant women and people prone to respiratory
illnesses.
Prof Bishop said because Australian authorities had successfully delayed the virus
entering the country, they had been able to learn a lot about it since the first
cases were reported in Mexico.
Describing it as a disease "of young people", he said that unlike the ordinary flu,
the H1N1 virus did not affect old and debilitated people.
In addition to Victoria's confirmed cases, there have been two in NSW, two in South
Australia and one in Queensland.
More than 11,000 cases have been confirmed worldwide.