Eight new cases of swine flu confirmed in Canada.

Eight more confirmed cases of swine flu were reported

in Canada on Thursday, bringing the national total to 27.

Four more cases were confirmed in Alberta – three men

and a woman from Calgary, all of whom recently returned from Mexico.

The four, all young adults, were recovering from what was described

as mild cases.

The other four new cases are in Windsor, N.S., bringing

the total there to eight. All of the cases are related to four sick

students at King’s-Edgehill School. The cases there are all mild and

health officials warned more people will likely contract the

illness.

Governments around the world are mobilizing their plans

for a widespread outbreak of swine flu, after the World Health

Organization raised its alert level a day earlier to phase five to

signal that a pandemic of swine flu is close to reality.

During a press briefing from Geneva, a WHO official

said the alert level will stay one below six, the pandemic phase,

until further notice.

"Today that assessment holds steady and we do not have

any evidence that we should move to phase six today or any such move

is imminent right now," said WHO acting assistant director general

Keiji Fukuda.

He reported a jump in the number of confirmed cases in

Mexico, where the outbreak of the new H1N1 strain is centred, to 97.

The number will likely continue to increase at a quicker pace now

that Mexico has its own testing capacity to verify cases. Health

experts from several countries, including Canada, have been in

Mexico to help authorities there get a laboratory up and running.

Samples from Mexico are also being tested at Canada’s National

Microbiology Laboratory in Mexico.

The United States updated its number of cases Thursday

to 109 and more cases in other countries were also confirmed by

laboratory testing.

The swine flu virus has now been confirmed in 13

countries and infected a total of 265 people, according to WHO’s

figures but it is also known to be in four more nations and is

suspected in at least a dozen others.

Canadian health officials say a pandemic plan was

kicked into motion days ago and that WHO’s change in alert level

doesn’t change their course of action.

American officials also said the new designation does

little to alter its plans but that the alert change "is a good

thing."

"It’s really a wakeup call to the rest of the global

community that if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going

on here and in Mexico, it’s time to pull out your pandemic plans and

think about what you would do if this infection were occurring in

your own borders," Richard Besser, head of the U.S. Centers for

Disease Control and Prevention, said at a daily briefing.

But WHO’s increase in alert level to five from four did

prompt further actions from other governments Thursday, such as

increased screening at airports and other ports of entry. Countries

are also checking their stockpiles of antiviral medications and WHO

announced it has begun distributing some drugs from its stockpiles

to developing countries.

Pharmaceutical companies are also busy investigating

how to scale up their productions of medications including Tamiflu

and Relenza.

A number of governments have been pitching in to help

Mexico deal with the outbreak, which has forced the closure of

schools, businesses and other public places and hit its tourism

sector hard. On Thursday, a plane carrying masks, gloves,

thermometers and other supplies left Beijing as part of China’s

emergency aid package for Mexico.

In other developments Thursday, WHO announced from now

on that it would refer to the new virus strain as influenza A H1N1,

instead of swine flu.

Because of the association of the new virus with pigs,

pork farmers around the world are being hit hard, even though the

illness is being spread by humans, not animals. About a dozen

countries have banned pork and live pig imports from Canada, Mexico

and the United States, and Egypt ordered the cull of pigs in that

country.

The travel industry is also being affected and on

Thursday, the International Air Transport Association made a plea

for governments to follow WHO’s advice that travel restrictions are

ineffective in trying to stem the spread of the virus. The airline

industry, already struggling because of the global recession, said

passengers should be reassured that the air filtration systems in

planes are similar to those in hospitals and that the aircraft are

regularly disinfected.

The European Union’s health ministers met and decided

against recommending a travel ban to Mexico on Thursday. Several

countries around the world, including Canada, have issued their own

advisories warning to avoid traveling to the popular tourist

destination unless necessary and tour operators have cancelled trips

there.

Health officials continue to remind the public that the

seasonal flu is also responsible for making thousands of people sick

and for killing an average of 4,000 Canadians every year. Normally,

fewer than 0.1 per cent of people with influenza die, if they have

no underlying medical conditions.