Teenage Girl Dies From Swine Flu

A 15-year-old girl has died in hospital in Scotland after contracting swine flu.The girl died in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow and had underlying medical conditions, the Scottish Government said.

She is the fourth person with swine flu to have died in Scotland and the 30th in the UK.

The news comes after the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that more than 700 people worldwide are now thought to have died after contracting the virus, which is spreading faster than any previous flu pandemic.

In the UK, an estimated 55,000 people are being newly diagnosed with the virus each week.

Earlier, the Chief Medical Officer for England said it was unlikely there would be school closures in the autumn to curb swine flu.

The latest WHO estimate on the number of worldwide deaths is a huge jump from the 429 deaths it reported on July 6.

In a briefing note published late last week, WHO said “further spread of the pandemic, within affected countries and to new countries, is considered inevitable”. It said the current pandemic “has spread internationally with unprecedented speed”.

He was speaking as experts argued that a school closure programme could “break the chains of transmission” and buy time to produce a vaccine.

Professor Neil Ferguson and Dr Simon Cauchemez, from the department of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London, cited studies showing that closing schools at the height of a flu pandemic could cut the number of cases by up to 45 per cent.

Yesterday Health Secretary Andy Burnham said the National Pandemic Flu Service for England would be up and running by the end of this week “subject to testing” and that the NHS had dealt “fantastically well” with the virus.