Thai A(H1N1) cases triple to 150 in 3 days

Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva urged the public not to panic, but warned that “it's not an easy fix” with tens of thousands of passengers arriving daily at airports from abroad.

“Definitely it will affect tourism, but I still think it's better to be transparent,” he said on his weekly television program Sunday. “Trying to conceal what's happening will only makes things worse.”

The number of cases in Thailand jumped from 47 on Friday to 106 on Saturday.

“We have found 150 confirmed H1N1 cases as of today,” Dr. Prat Boonyavongvirot, permanent secretary of the Public Health Ministry, said Sunday.

“They are not new cases, but we just got laboratory confirmation from patients' samples we took earlier,” he said. “More lab test results are coming, so we expect the number to continue to rise in the next few days.”

Most of the patients were living in the capital, Bangkok, and had recently returned from trips abroad, Boonyavongvirot said. Schools reported the most concentrated cases.

There have been no reported deaths from the disease in Thailand, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on Thursday.

The WHO says 74 countries have reported nearly 30,000 cases of swine flu, including 145 deaths.

The health ministry said Thailand has 420,000 courses of anti-viral medicine on hand and can produce another 100,000 within one month.

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