WHO Calls Emergency Meeting on Swine Flu
April 25th, 2009Via: Reuters:
The World Health Organization said on Friday it was calling an emergency committee to advise whether outbreaks of swine flu in humans in the United States and Mexico constituted an international public health threat.
A deadly strain of swine flu never seen before has broken out in Mexico, killing as many as 60 people and raising fears of a possible spread across North America.
“WHO will convene, sometime in the very near future, an emergency committee under the International Health Regulations, which will consider whether or not this event constitutes a public health event of international concern,” WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told Reuters in Geneva.
Hartl also said that 12 of 18 samples taken from victims in Mexico showed the virus had a genetic structure identical to that of a swine flu virus found in California.
But more epidemiological information was needed before any change to the WHO’s pandemic alert level, currently at ‘3’ on a scale of 1 to 6, he said.
“The technical people in our organization are saying that before we know how pandemic a virus can be, we need to know how efficiently it is transmitting and how widespread it is,” Hartl said.
Already in NYC apparently: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/nyregion/25sick.html
Watch out guys. This could become another major concern for global business as well as a pretext to ban mass gatherings at all in endangered regions.
Why aren’t we closing the southern border?
Does anyone understand the vaccine that they describe using in Mexico City? How could they possibly have developed a vaccine specific to this virus, and why would they be using last season’s regular flu vaccine for this. After all, influenza vaccines often don’t work well for the common flu virus. Also, while Mexico city has a middle class, I don’t see how poorer residents in small dwellings could possibly stop spreading this just by avoiding subways and schools.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/8018428.stm