Incoming flights from swine flu-inflicted are not prevented from landing in the Kingdom, the Civil Defense said. Mohammed Noor Rahimi, President of the General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA) said the necessary measures are being taken at all entry points into the Kingdom to check screen people for the disease. He said that no flight was diverted from landing in the Kingdom since advisories from the World Health Organization and the International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) do not call for closure of airports but instead emphasize on enforcing strict preventive measures at airports. Rahimi said the government has instructed all the authorities concerned to make checks and take the necessary measures for suspected carriers of the disease. Meanwhile, WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the UN food agency had expressed concerns that the term “swine flu” was misleading. “Rather than calling this swine flu ... we're going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A,” Thompson said. The WHO says the virus is being spread from human-to-human, not from contact with infected pigs. On Friday, Denmark and Hong Kong confirmed their first cases of H1N1 influenza A infection. Denmark's National Board of Health said the person contracted the virus abroad. The infected person detected in Hong Kong – the first confirmed case in Asia – had arrived Thursday via Shanghai from Mexico where more than 160 suspected deaths have been reported. In the US, worries about the spread of the virus mounted as the caseload passed 100, and nearly 300 schools closed in communities across the country. Cases now are confirmed in New York, Texas, California, South Carolina, Kansas, Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, Maine, Colorado, Georgia and Minnesota. The outbreak even touched the White House, which disclosed that an aide to Energy Secretary Steven Chu apparently got sick helping arrange President Barack Obama's recent trip to Mexico but that the aide did not fly on Air Force One and never posed a risk to the president. So far, the United States has 118 confirmed cases, Mexico 312, Canada 34, Germany 4, Britain 8, Israel 2, New Zealand 4, Spain 13, Austria 1, Costa Rica 2, Netherlands 1, Switzerland 1, Denmark 1, Hong Kong 1.
