The first cases of A/H1N1 flu were reported in Asia on Saturday, prompting health officials to quarantine the sick and take other actions to prevent a spread of the outbreak that has rattled the world for a week.

South Korea reported its first confirmed case of the never-seen-before flu on Saturday. A 51-year-old nun, quarantined since Tuesday after returning from Mexico, has been diagnosed with the new flu strain, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement.

Hong Kong authorities said hours earlier that a Mexican who arrived by air on Thursday from his homeland has been diagnosed with the disease and is Asia's first confirmed case of the new flu.

After the confirmation, authorities in Hong Kong immediately raised the flu alert level from "serious" to the highest level of "emergency" and quarantined hundreds of guests and workers in the hotel where the patient has been staying.

The Chinese government decided to suspend flights from Mexico to Shanghai because of the case, the Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.

The government also is considering sending a chartered plane to Mexico City to return a group of Chinese people who had planned to fly to Shanghai on Sunday.

With the first cases confirmed in Asia, a number of countries and regions, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea,Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and Taiwan, issued advisories against non-essential travel to Mexico and took other precautionary measures.

As of 1900 GMT Friday, the World Health Organization said the total number of confirmed A/H1N1 flu cases had reached 365.

Besides Mexico and the United States, the virus has been detected in Austria (1), Canada (34), Hong Kong, China (1), Denmark (1), Germany (3), Israel (2), Netherlands (1), New Zealand(3), Spain (13), Switzerland (1), France (2) and Great Britain (8).

The WHO said it was confident that a new vaccine could be made to immunize people against the A/H1N1 virus, though it would take at least four months for the first medicine to become available.

Meanwhile, the Mexican government put the country's confirmed death toll from the flu at 16 and the case count at 397.

Mexico closed all but essential government services and private businesses Friday, the beginning of a five-day break that includes a holiday weekend.

Almost all of the flu cases outside of Mexico have been mild and only a handful of patients have required hospital treatment, researchers said, noting, though, that a 3-month-old boy from Mexico died from the illness in the United States.

Also on Friday, the flu chief for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that the A/H1N1 strain lacks the traits that showed up in the 1918 pandemic virus, which killed about 40 million to 50 million people worldwide.

Despite the encouraging news, US health officials warned the public to wash their hands frequently and urged the sick to avoid travel.

The CDC said that as of late Friday, about 151 cases of the new flu have been confirmed in the United States.

(Xinhua News Agency May 2, 2009)