WHo raises pandermic flu alert level to phase 5

GENEVA – The World Health Organization has raised its pandemic alert for swine flu to the second highest level, meaning that it believes a global outbreak of the disease is imminent.

WHO says the phase 5 alert means there is sustained human to human spread in at least two countries. It also signals that efforts to produce a vaccine will be ramped up.

WHO has confirmed human cases of swine flu in Mexico, the United States, Canada, Britain, Israel, New Zealand and Spain. Mexico and the U.S. have reported deaths.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan made the decision Wednesday to raise the alert level from phase 4 — signifying transmission in only one country — after reviewing the latest scientific evidence on the outbreak.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

BERLIN (AP) — The World Health Organization warned Wednesday that the swine flu outbreak is moving closer to becoming a pandemic, as the United States reported the first swine flu death outside of Mexico, and Germany and Austria became latest European nations hit by the disease.

In Geneva, WHO flu chief Dr. Keiji Fukuda told reporters that there was no evidence the virus was slowing down, moving the agency closer to raising its pandemic alert to phase 5, indicating widespread human-to-human transmission.

But he said the health body not yet ready to move the pandemic alert level up from its current level of 4, which means the virus is being passed among people. Phase 6 — the highest in the scale — is for a full-scale pandemic.

As fear and uncertainty about the disease ricocheted around the globe, nations took all sorts of precautions, some more useful than others.

Britain closed a school after a 12-year-old girl was found to have the disease. Egypt slaughtered all its pigs and the central African nation of Gabon became the latest nation to ban pork imports, despite assurances that swine flu was not related to eating pork.

Cuba eased its flight ban, deciding just to block flights coming in from Mexico. And Asian nations greeted returning airport travelers with teams of medical workers and carts of disinfectants, eager to keep swine flu from infecting their continent.

In Mexico City, the epicenter of the epidemic, the mayor said Wednesday the outbreak seemed to be stabilizing and he was considering easing the citywide shutdown that closed schools, restaurants, concert halls and sports arenas.

Swine flu is suspected of killing more than 150 people in Mexico and sickening over 2,400 there.
Dr. Richard Besser, the acting chief of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said 91 cases have now been confirmed in 10 states, and health officials there reported Wednesday that a 23-month-old Mexican boy had died in Texas from the disease.

Across Europe, Germany confirmed three swine flu cases and Austria one, while the number of confirmed cases rose to five in Britain and ten in Spain.

WHO conducted a scientific review Wednesday to determine exactly what is known about how the disease spreads, how it affects human health and how it can be treated.

Dr. Nikki Shindo, a WHO flu expert, said the review would focus on the large trove of data coming from Mexico and from a school in New York City that has been hard-hit by the outbreak.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the country's three cases include a 22-year-old woman hospitalized in Hamburg, a man in his late 30s at a hospital in Regensburg, north of Munich, and a 37-year-old woman from another Bavarian town. All three had recently returned from Mexico.

Austria's health ministry said a 28-year-old woman who recently returned from a monthlong trip to Guatemala via Mexico City and Miami has the virus but is recovering.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said health officials were ordering extra medicine and "several million more" face masks to deal with the virus.

British media reports, citing an unidentified European surgical mask manufacturer, said the U.K. was seeking 32 million masks to protect its health workers from a possible pandemic.

"We've decided to build stocks of anti-virals, from 35 million to 50 million," Brown said, adding that the government had put in enhanced airport checks and was going to mail swine flu information leaflets to every household in Britain.

In addition to a couple in Scotland who got swine flu on their Mexican honeymoon, new British cases included a 12-year-old girl in the southwest English town of Torbay. Brown said her school had been closed as a precaution.

He said the other two cases were adults in London and in Birmingham. All three had visited Mexico, were receiving anti-viral drugs and were responding well to treatment, Brown said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy met with Cabinet ministers to discuss swine flu and his health minister said France will ask the European Union to suspend flights to Mexico.

The U.S., the European Union and other countries have discouraged nonessential travel to Mexico. Cuba suspended all regular and charter flights from Mexico to the island but was still allowing airlines to return travelers to Mexico.

New Zealand's number of swine flu cases rose to 14, 13 of them among a school group that recently returned from Mexico. Officials say the swine flu strain infecting the students is the same as that in Mexico. All were responding well to antiviral drugs and in voluntary quarantine at home.

New Zealand has 44 other possible cases, with tests under way.

Mexico was taking drastic measures to fight the outbreak. It closed all archaeological sites and allowed restaurants in the capital to only serve takeout food in an aggressive bid to stop gatherings where the virus can spread. Schools remained closed until at least May 6.

A regional beach soccer championship in Mexico was postponed and all Mexican first-division soccer games this weekend will be played with no audiences. Cruise lines were avoiding Mexican ports and holiday tour groups are canceling holiday charter flights there.

The Philippine health chief appealed to dozens of Filipino legislators to abandon plans to visit Las Vegas to cheer for boxing idol Manny Pacquiao — even though Las Vegas is more than 300 miles (480 kilometers) from the Mexican border.

Egypt's government ordered the slaughter of all pigs in the country as a precaution, though no swine flu cases have been reported there. Egypt's overwhelmingly Muslim population does not eat pork, but farmers raise up to 350,000 pigs for its Christian minority.

In Australia, officials were testing more than 100 people with flu symptoms for the virus and the government gave health authorities wide powers to contain contagious diseases.

"(We can make) sure that people are isolated and perhaps detained if they don't cooperate and are showing symptoms," said Health Minister Nicola Roxon.

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Associated Press Writers around the world contributed to this report.

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ps: to all my friends all around the world, please be careful with this swine flu as it spreads thru human contacts...it's Phase 5...!!!so please be more careful guys...we never know who we're living with...please dont go to affected countries and forget all your thoughts to have holidays there to prevent this hazardous disease...i just can wish and pray for your safety...i love u guys so much so please stay healthy as much as u can...

Chef Karam Is In The Star..!!!

The chefs who prepared the menu for the Symphony of Chefs dinner are (from left) Frederic Cerchi, Emmanuel Stroobant, Antoine Rodriquez, Bala Murali Nanda and Karam Singh.

TWO days before Valentine’s Day, a group of men got together to produce a five-course menu that few people would have the opportunity to enjoy in one seating.

Butternut pumpkin purée, Norwegian salmon with Champagne sauce, and Kobe beef in two styles were bookended by a lobster-foie gras combination and Valrhona chocolate mousse.

A celebrating couple would have found any one of those dishes unforgettable, but experiencing all five would be long remembered after the romance is over!

The dinner, billed as the Symphony of Chefs, presented a menu that was distinctively French in its cooking methods, presentation and service, and the fact that it was served at a chef’s table in the kitchen amidst the activity added an atmosphere of conviviality – another typical feature of the French meal – to the proceedings.

The dishes also showcased luxury ingredients that explain why French culinary arts have become synonymous with gourmet food. However, it was an invaluable experience for the students of Taylor’s School of Hospitality and Tourism (TSHT), which hosted the dinner, to learn from chefs of such high repute, who each prepared his signature dish.

The common impression that French food is rich and time-consuming to make was only substantiated by the elaborately prepared dishes at the dinner. It should be noted, however, that this type of gourmet dining experience is mostly reserved for high-end restaurants.
“French cuisine is considered a major world cuisine,” says Chef Antoine Rodriguez, executive chef at Le Meridien KL.

Chef Antoine Rodriquez’s Kobe Beef Cheek.

“But there are not many fine dining restaurants for French food in Asia,” he adds, citing unfamiliarity with the ingredients and cooking methods as the reason for this.

“It is harder to appeal to the masses here, unlike Italian food, for instance, which is based very much on chilli.”

But Rodriguez says Asians would not be averse to all French food.

He says the food in the south and south-east of France, which is warmer, is light, uses a lot of seasonal vegetables and meat like lamb, which the Malaysian palate would be more familiar with.

“It is more a summer cuisine,” he says.

“It’s just like food in the north and south of Thailand,” Chef Emmanuel Stroobant interjects.

“I think the cuisine that resembles French cooking the most is Japanese,” explains the TV personality known as the Chef in Black.

“In terms of cooking according to the season, the ingredients and presentation, they are very similar.”

Much of French cuisine is, in fact, fairly simple, relying on high-quality fresh and seasonal ingredients that are lovingly prepared rather than complex recipes.

Chef Karam Singh’s Varlhona Chocolate Mousse.

“That is the basis for all types of French cooking regardless of ingredients and region,” says Stroobant.

At the heart of every French kitchen, both domestic and professional, are a number of cooking techniques and food preparation methods.

It may seem simply as a way for head chefs to torture their underlings but the meticulous way food is cut up, for example, is just as important as how it is cooked.

Bill Buford writes in Heat, an account of his time as a “kitchen slave” in a three-star restaurant in New York, about being forced to discard a whole mound of carrots he had been dicing up and would eventually be pulped anyway, because they were not all a uniform size.

The cut he is talking about, known as brunoise in chef-speak, entails cutting vegetables into 3mm cubes.

As the traditional base of most French soups, a trinity of diced carrots, celery and onion – or mirepoix – is essential. Cutting the vegetables the same size allows them to cook at the same time.

Before puréeing the butternut pumpkin for his soup, TSHT lecturer Chef Frederic Cerchi first smoked the squash using a mixture of sugar, star anise and cinnamon, among other things.

“It’s an autumn-winter type of dish,” says Cerchi of the deep yellow soup topped with a swirl of crème fraîche and served uniquely in a mason jar.

Stroobant’s dish of lobster wrapped in duck liver – or to use its fancy name, Torchon de Foie Gras et Homard Canadien – was prepared sous-vide, yet another cooking method employed in French kitchens. Here, the roll of meat was wrapped tightly in cling film and poached in a water bath in the oven.

“This type of vacuum cooking prevents the meat from drying out as there is no direct heat on the food,” he says.

Pan searing is a common technique which seems simple, but takes a good sense of timing to keep the food from burning or being undercooked. It is a technique used to brown food quickly over high heat on the range top. Pan searing cooks the surface of the food (usually meat, poultry or fish) at high temperature so that a caramelised crust forms.

Chef Bala Murali Nanda, course leader in TSHT’s Diploma in Culinary Arts programme, prepared a pan-seared Norwegian salmon served over a polenta pancake with sautéed slices of zucchini, daikon and brinjal layered with caviar.

An essential lesson in French cookery is stock reduction. Glace de viande, a thick meat glaze made by reducing meat juices, which gives it a rich flavour, is something that students would learn very early in their culinary arts programme.

Rodriguez’s Kobe beef jus seemed to be an element in itself on the plate. The dish came with a side of creamed potato and was garnished with rocket and Parmesan shavings. The second style of meat was Wagyu cheek in a “curry” sauce.

For dessert lovers, the exclamation point to the dinner would have been the Valrhona chocolate mousse with caramelised bananas in Cointreau by Chef Karam Singh, TSHT course leader for pastry (short courses).

The chilled mousse was set in a chocolate crumb base, which also contained the orange liqueur – with a 40% alcohol content! – and plated with a chocolate scroll, fresh berries and Alexander Calder swirls of fruit coulis.

(Adapted from The Star, 16 March 2008)

p/s: He's amazing chef that i've ever met...he's so cool and absofab... CAIYOK!!!

fRASY lIVE lUX

~XOXO~