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Posted: 27-May-2009 02:58 hrs
A commuter wears a mask at a subway station in Taipei on May 25, 2009. The World Health Organisation will consult scientists over the coming weeks to clear up the criteria needed to declare a pandemic with the new A(H1N1) flu virus, a senior official said Tuesday. The World Health Organisation will consult scientists over the coming weeks to clear up the criteria needed to declare a pandemic with the new A(H1N1) flu virus, a senior official said Tuesday.
"We are trying to see what kind of adjustments must be made to make sure that the definitions really meet the situation," said interim Assistant Director General Keiji Fukuda.
"To do this we will be asking a number of prominent scientists and people who have a good perspective on these issues to help us think this through," he told journalists.
The move follows appeals by several countries last week for more caution before moving up a step from the current phase five alert to declaring a pandemic.
Under the current rulebook, phase six would involve a purely geographical step with sustained community spread in another WHO region to the Americas, where the virus first emerged in April.
But officials said last week they were also taking into account issues such as the severity of the virus, possible changes in the pattern of illness, its impact on poor countries or circulation in the southern hemisphere where it could mix with seasonal flu.
Fukuda said the outbreak, which has now infected nearly 13,000 people in 46 countries, including 92 deaths, was continuing to evolve.
"I think it's quite possible that it will continue to spread and it will establish itself in many other countries in multiple regions, at which time I think it would be fair to call it a pandemic at that point," Fukuda said.
"But right now we're clearly in the early times of the evolution of this virus and we'll see where it goes," he added.
The WHO is confident that enough countries are able to detect the spread of swine flu in the southern hemisphere or in poorer regions of the world, where weakened chronically ill populations might suffer more severely.
"We are comfortable that countries are doing the kinds of public health actions that they need to be taking right now," he added.
Most of the cases of A(H1N1) have been relatively mild, and the WHO has admitted that its pandemic response plan was largely designed around the more lethal H5N1 avian influenza virus.
Fukuda emphasised that the plan was largely a tool designed to ensure that countries mobilised against the threat of a new flu virus. — AFP
From TODAYOnline.com; see the source article here.
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