Influenza

More than half a million Hong Kong schoolchildren stayed at home, Thursday, March 13, due to the closure for two weeks of all kindergartens and schools, a decision taken by the authorities to contain an outbreak of influenza. This is the first time that such a measure is adopted since the outbreak of atypical pneumonia , which had killed nearly 300 people in 2003 in Hong Kong. The government announced the measure after the death of three children of 2, 3 and 7 years, in the past two weeks. All of them had shown symptoms of flu. The case is not related to bird flu, although some twenty birds have officially been infected with the H5N1 virus last year in the former British colony.