Thai health officials said today that a baby had been born in Thailand with H1N1 flu having contracted the virus while still in the womb.
The baby was born prematurely on Saturday, when doctors decided to deliver it by caesarean section seven months into the pregrancy of a 24-year-old mother who was found to be infected with the flu virus.
"The baby is stable. We are now figuring out how it got infected. This is the only case of infection from mother to unborn baby that we have had," said Dr Suriya Coohahrat, a senior health official in Ratchaburi province, where the woman was first admitted to hospital.
The mother is still very ill in hospital.
Another doctor was quoted in local media as saying three cases of mother-to-child transmission of H1N1 had been reported in the United States.
Thailand had reported 44 deaths from H1N1 and more than 6,700 infections as of July 22nd, the highest number in Southeast Asia.
The
Nationnewspaper reported that the Public Health ministry would announce the death toll had risen to 66 at its weekly update on Wednesday.
Seperately, Russia's top health official has ordered authorities to stop groups of students travelling to Britain and other countries on foreign language courses to curb the spread of the H1N1 flu virus.
Gennady Onishchenko, the country's public health chief, ordered regional leaders "to take measures to prevent organised groups of children leaving the country until further notice", his press service said in a statement today.
He also ordered officials to convince companies to cancel language tours, the statement said. Russian agencies earlier quoted him as saying the move was specifically designed to prevent English-language tours to Britain.
Russia has 28 confirmed cases of H1N1 flu compared with 100,000 cases discovered every week in Britain, officials said.
"On balance health outweighs ... knowledge of a language. It must be so," Mr Onishchenko was quoted as saying yesterday in government-owned daily
Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
The World Health Organisation declared an H1N1 influenza pandemic on June 11th. The new virus has killed more than 800 people worldwide since it emerged in April.
Reuters