Stockholm/Geneva - The number of confirmed cases of swine flu in the European Union went beyond 50 on Sunday with two further cases confirmed in Germany, health officials reported, amid signs of a slowdown in the spread of the virus. With Germany reporting an increase by two cases to 8, the number of confirmed cases came atop the 49 which the EU's centre for disease control ECDC in Stockholm had reported earlier Sunday.
The ECDC said there had been ten new confirmed cases reported in Germany, Spain, Ireland and Italy, in addition to nine new suspected cases in Britain and Portugal.
In Madrid, Spanish health authorities reported Sunday that the number of confirmed swine flu cases in the country had doubled to 40 over the previous 24 hours, but that the number of suspected cases had declined over the past few days.
The Health Ministry said that none of the infected persons was seriously ill, with just six of the victims being treated in hospitals.
Medical officials were still examining 83 further suspected cases, a figure indicating a decline in the spread of the virus over the past few days. Previously, officials had reported 116 suspected swine flu cases.
In Italy, a second new case of swine flu was confirmed, that of a 25-year-old man who recently had returned from a trip to Mexico. But the man in the meantime had recovered.
The EU swine flu cases are among the worldwide confirmed tally of upwards of 800 including 473 in Mexico where the virus was first detected.
On Saturday the World Health Organisation in Geneva rejected an assertion by the US disease control authority CDC that the mutated swine flu virus A/H1N1 did not appear to have the same deadly power as the Spanish flu virus of 1918-1919 which killed over 25 million people.
WHO director Michael Ryan, in countering this assertion, said that "these viruses are very unpredictable" and that it could still turn out that the swine flu could develop into a pandemic.
Ryan said that the WHO still had to assume that alarm level 6 - that of a pandemic - would be reached. At the moment, WHO has an alert status of 5.
"We have to suspect that phase 6 is reached but we have to hope that it is not reached," he said, while also noting, "at this stage it would be unwise to suggest or to say it was spreading in an uncontrolled fashion."
