At Least 20 Dead, Hundreds Ill in Swine Flu Outbreak in Mexico

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In response to the outbreak, Mexico City closed schools -- from kindergartens to the university level -- as well as museums, libraries, and state-run theaters across the metropolis of 20 million people on Friday, and urged people with flu symptoms to stay home from work, according to published reports.

"We're dealing with a new flu virus that constitutes a respiratory epidemic that so far is controllable," Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told reporters late Thursday, after meeting with President Felipe Calderon and other top officials. He said the virus had mutated from pigs and had at some point been transmitted to humans, The New York Times reported.

While Mexico's flu season is usually over by now, health officials noticed a sizeable uptick in flu cases in recent weeks. The World Health Organization reported about 800 cases of flu-like symptoms in Mexico in recent weeks, most of them among healthy young adults, with 57 deaths in Mexico City and three in central Mexico, the Times said.

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That could be worrisome. Seasonal flus usually strike hardest at infants and the elderly, but pandemic flus -- such as the 1918 Spanish flu -- often strike young, healthy people, the newspaper reported.

On Thursday, U.S. health officials had announced that seven people in California and Texas had been diagnosed with a unique form of swine flu.

On Friday, another case of swine flu had been confirmed in a child in San Diego, bringing the total number of U.S. cases to eight, Besser said. The child has recovered from the illness, he added.

All of the U.S. patients have recovered, Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a Thursday afternoon teleconference. "So far this is not looking like a very severe influenza," she said.

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