WASHINGTON â€”  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 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.

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CHENGDU, China, Aug. 9 — A highly infectious swine virus is sweeping China’s pig population, driving up pork prices and creating fears of a global pandemic among domesticated pigs.

Animal virus experts say Chinese authorities are playing down the gravity and spread of the disease.

So far, the mysterious virus — believed to cause an unusually deadly form of an infection known as blue-ear pig disease — has spread to 25 of this country’s 33 provinces and regions, prompting a pork shortage and the strongest inflation in China in a decade.

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By MARK STEVENSON – 12 minutes ago

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A new swine flu strain that has killed as many as 68 people and sickened more than 1,000 across Mexico has “pandemic potential,” the World Health Organization chief said Saturday, and it may be too late to contain the sudden outbreak.

The disease has already reached Texas and California, and with 24 new suspected cases reported Saturday in Mexico City alone, schools were closed and all public events suspended in the capital until further notice — including more than 500 concerts and other gatherings in the metropolis of 20 million.

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By Jason Gale

April 23 (Bloomberg) — An urgent probe into an unusual flu outbreak that’s infected seven people in the U.S. was widened after Mexico sought assistance to investigate more than 130 cases of severe respiratory disease that may be related.

Authorities in Mexico asked the Public Health Agency of Canada to help identify the cause of the lung illness linked to 20 deaths, including two in the state of Baja California Norte, which borders California. The Mexican cases include five health- care workers, the Ottawa-based agency said in an e-mail today.

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MEXICO CITY — Mexican officials, scrambling to control a swine flu outbreak that has killed at least 16 people and possibly dozens more in recent weeks, shuttered schools from kindergarten to university for m illions of young people in and around the capital on Friday and urged people with flu symptoms to stay home from work.

”We’re dealing with a new flu virus that constitutes a respiratory epidemic that so far is controllable,” Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told reporters late Thursday, after huddling with President Felipe Calderón and other top officials. He said the virus had mutated from pigs and had at some point been transmitted to humans.