Hong Kong shut all primary schools and kindergartens, halting classes for more than half a million students, after four children with flu-like symptoms died.

“We have been working closely with the Department of Health and the secondary schools the last few days to know more about this spread,” said Anna Chan, an officer with the Education Bureau.” The young get contaminated more easily.”

Hong Kong announced the closures late yesterday, five years after severe acute respiratory syndrome killed 299 people and crippled the city’s economy. The government closely monitors influenza outbreaks, with the airport screening all incoming passengers for signs of fever.

“At this time of the year, it’s a viral soup everywhere,” said Peter Cordingley, the Manila-based spokesman for the World Health Organization’s Western Pacific region. “There is nothing exceptional in what is happening in Hong Kong at the moment.”

Two of the children who died tested positive for influenza A, the Health Department said. It declined to cite influenza as the cause of the deaths. Another two children died after suffering flu-like symptoms, the department said, adding that tests haven’t yet confirmed the presence of influenza A.

China’s government will cooperate with its “Hong Kong counterparts to control this flu incident so it does not spread,” Li Changjiang, head of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, told reporters at a press conference in Beijing today. He didn’t say what action China would take.

“Little Drastic”

Closing schools “might be a little drastic, but it’s a reassurance to the community,” Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow told reporters today.

The influenza viruses circulating in Hong Kong this year are predominantly type B and a variant of the type A (H3N2) strain that caused epidemics in Australia last year, including the deaths of three children, said John Nicholls, associate professor of pathology at the University of Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong, “there is a large number of kids being infected,” he said. Actual deaths from the disease are still very low, he said in an interview yesterday.

A 7-year-old boy died at the city’s Tuen Mun Hospital and the school closed amid the flu outbreak, state broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong reported. A 3-year-old and 27-month-old have also died. No common factors between the deaths have been identified at this stage, according to the government.

“High Anxiety”

“If you look back to SARS, you can understand why there is a high level of anxiety in Hong Kong,” WHO’s Cordingley said. “Hong Kong is a very jam-packed-tight type city and it’s the perfect place for transmission lines to thrive.”

The deaths will be investigated to see whether the virus is mutating, Yuen Kwok-yung, a University of Hong Kong professor in microbiology, said at a press conference yesterday.

The Hospital Authority said it has earmarked HK$20 million ($2.6 million) to implement measures up to the end of April to cope with a surge in demand for public hospital services.

Flu outbreaks were confirmed at three primary schools yesterday, the Centre for Health Protection said on its Web site. The outbreak is suspected to have spread to 20 other schools, it said.

Last week, 13 cases were confirmed, still below the peak of 22 recorded during 2007’s flu season, the center, part of the government’s health department, said. Hospital admission rates due to flu among children younger than five years old and the elderly, while rising, are still below those recorded during the peak seasons in the past two years, the center said.

Hong Kong had 140,783 kindergarten and 410,516 primary students the school year ended July 2007, according to the Hong Kong Education Bureau’s Web site. The closures affect children aged between 3 and 11.

Resistant Viruses

The current northern hemisphere flu season is the strongest in four years, and hasn’t been this severe this late in the season in more than 10 years, said Craig Maxwell, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. health-care analyst in London, in a note to clients.

The jump in flu cases is happening because this year’s vaccine is effective against fewer than half the strains infecting people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Scientists have also found strains of the H1N1 seasonal flu virus capable of evading Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu antiviral drug in 20 countries in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific during the past three months.

The prevalence of resistant viruses ranges from 3 percent in Australia to 66 percent in Norway. In Hong Kong, 11 out of 116 samples from patients infected with the H1N1 virus harbored resistance to the pill, the World Health Organization said in a statement on March 6.

Source: Bloomberg
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