WHO: Swine Flu Pandemic is imminent
This comes from Bloomberg. Unfortunately it is pretty scary stuff:
The World Health Organization said the first pandemic since 1968 is imminent after an outbreak of swine flu spread to eight nations and 11 U.S. states.
The WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan raised the agency’s six-phase pandemic alert to 5 from 4, the second jump in three days, at a news conference in Geneva today. Level 5 means a pandemic, or a global outbreak of a new virus, is near.
“The biggest question right now is this: how severe will the pandemic be,” Chan said. World nations “should treat this as an opportunity to ramp up preparedness.”
WHO and other health authorities have begun developing a vaccine against the disease, linked to 159 deaths in Mexico and 1 in the U.S. More than 100 swine-flu cases have been confirmed in North America, Europe and the Pacific, and the virus will probably spread, Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director-general for health security and environment, said today in a conference call with reporters.
“We have been preparing all along as if this is going to stage 6,” Janet Napolitano, U.S. Homeland Security secretary, said at a news conference in Washington earlier today. “Our preparations are for a situation in which this does become a full-fledged pandemic.”
About Edward Harrison
- First Swine Flu death in Texas (video) 29 Apr 2009
- Swine Flu has Mexican peso bears feeding at the trough 27 Apr 2009
- Swine Flu video primer from the Wall Street Journal 27 Apr 2009
- Swine Flu Tempature Rises, Dollar and Yen Remain Firm 28 Apr 2009
Amazing. But I am reassured by the fact that there is action being taken now while the numbers are still small.
I am sorry but how the hell does what we are witnessing resemble a real epidemic? You have one hundred people dying in a country that has pathetic health care services, suffers from the lack of clean water and is absolutely filthy and overcrowded. The simple fact that so few people died in a place as crowded as Mexico City shows that there is little to worry about from this strain. This is beginning to look a lot like the swine flu epidemic scare when I was in high school. At the time the vaccine killed more people than the flu did.