WHO to stop using term ‘swine flu’
msnbc reports:
As worldwide cases of swine flu climbed to 257 on Thursday, the World Health Organization announced it will would stop using the term “swine flu” to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs.
The policy shift comes a day after global health authorities warned that swine flu was threatening to bloom into a pandemic and notched up their alert system to the second highest level.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the U.N. food agency had expressed concerns that the term “swine flu” was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to ban pork products and order the slaughter of pigs.
“Rather than calling this swine flu … we’re going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A,” Thompson said.
Egypt began slaughtering its roughly 300,000 pigs Wednesday even though experts said swine flu is not linked to pigs and not spread by eating pork. Angry farmers protested the government degree.
In Paris, the World Organization for Animal Health said Thursday “there is no evidence of infection in pigs, nor of humans acquiring infection directly from pigs.” Killing pigs “will not help to guard against public or animal health risks” presented by the virus and “is inappropriate,” the group said in a statement.
China, Russia, Ukraine and other nations have banned pork exports from Mexico and parts of the United States, blaming swine flu fears.
Most in the Muslim world consider pigs unclean animals and do not eat pork because of religious restrictions. The farmers in Egypt raise the pigs for consumption by the country’s Christian minority.
The virus has spread farther in Europe, showing up in the Netherlands and Switzerland. But most of the newly confirmed cases came from Mexico. WHO’s flu chief Keiji Fukuda said Thursday the number of confirmed cases in Mexico has increased to 99 from 26, including eight deaths.
In the Netherlands, a 3-year-old child who recently returned from Mexico became the country’s first confirmed case of swine flu, the Dutch government announced Thursday. In Switzerland, a 19-year-old student with swine flu was mistakenly released from a hospital and then hastily readmitted, health officials said.
WHO said the global threat is serious enough to ramp up efforts to produce a vaccine against the virus. The group raised its pandemic alert for swine flu Wednesday, meaning that it believes a global outbreak of the disease is imminent. It was the first time that WHO had declared a phase 5 outbreak.
WHO Director General Margaret Chan declaredthe phase 5 alert after consulting with flu experts from around the world. The decision could lead the global body to recommend additional measures to combat the outbreak, including for vaccine manufacturers to switch production from seasonal flu vaccines to a pandemic vaccine.
“All countries should immediately now activate their pandemic preparedness plans,” Chan told reporters in Geneva. “It really is all of humanity that is under threat in a pandemic.”
There was no evidence on Thursday to suggest that WHO should raise its pandemic alert to the highest level due to a swine flu outbreak, Fukuda said.
“Today that evidence holds steady,” Fukuda told reporters.
In Washington, President Barack Obama promised “great vigilance” in confronting the outbreak, which has sickened 116 people in 15 states and forced schools to close. A Mexican toddler who visited Texas with his family died Monday night in Houston, becoming the first fatality in the U.S.
The virus, a mix of pig, bird and human genes to which people have limited natural immunity, has also spread to Canada, New Zealand, Britain, Germany, Spain, Israel and Austria.
A phase 5 alert means there is sustained transmission among people in at least two countries. Once the virus shows effective transmission in two different regions of the world, a full pandemic outbreak — phase 6 — would be declared, meaning a global epidemic of a new and potentially deadly disease.
“It is important to take this very seriously,” Chan told a news conference watched around the globe on Wednesday. But for the average person, the term “pandemic” doesn’t mean they’re suddenly at greater risk.
The virus is believed to have sickened nearly 3,000 people across Mexico. Mexico has taken drastic action to squelch a swine flu epidemic, ordering a suspension of private business activity and nonessential federal government activities.
Health Secretary Angel Cordova Villalobos announced the decision to shut down most of the country’s government and economy shortly after his department reported the increase in confirmed cases of infection.
Vital services like transportation and airports will remain open, as will crucial economic services like pharmacies and the media, Cordova said, according to reports from several Mexican newspapers. The Associated Press later confirmed the suspension plans.
Outside of Mexico, almost all cases have had only light symptoms, and only a handful of cases have needed hospitalization.
Officials warned more deaths could be expected as surveillance of the illness increases.
Pharmaceutical companies should ramp up manufacturing, Chan said. Two antiviral drugs — Relenza, made by GlaxoSmithKline and Tamiflu, made by Roche AG — have been shown to work against the H1N1 strain.
As fear and uncertainty about the disease ricocheted around the globe, Chan added that WHO did not recommend closing borders or forgoing pork.
Nations are taking all sorts of precautions, some more useful than others.
Apart from Egypt’s misguided attempt to curb swine flu spread by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of pigs, Britain, with only five cases, is trying to buy 32 million masks. And in the United States, Obama said more of the country’s 132,000 schools may have to be shuttered.
At airports from Japan to South Korea to Greece and Turkey, thermal cameras were trained on airline passengers to see if any were feverish. And Lebanon discouraged traditional Arab peck-on-the-cheek greetings, even though no one has come down with the virus there.
Peru and Ecuador joined Cuba and Argentina on Wednesday in banning travel either to or from Mexico, and other nations considered similar bans. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy met with cabinet ministers to discuss swine flu, and the health minister said France would ask the European Union to suspend flights to Mexico.
The U.S., the European Union and other countries have discouraged nonessential travel to Mexico. Some countries have urged their citizens to avoid the United States and Canada as well. But health officials said such bans would do little to stop the virus, and WHO said total bans on travel to Mexico were questionable because the virus is already fairly widespread.
In Europe, EU health ministers have agreed to work “without delay” with drugmakers to develop a pilot vaccine to fight swine flu. The EU ministers say they are committed “to closely cooperate together” to combat the spread of the virus across the 27-nation bloc and agreed to step up sharing health data such as treatment and prevention measures in the wake of the flu’s spread.
The ministers, who held emergency talks Thursday, also set up a special expert committee that will meet regularly to coordinate national measures, including travel advisories and communication campaigns to the public.
EU Health Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou says the EU has taken “a united front” to fight the disease which has already been confirmed in six European countries.
Hunting for the source
Scientists believe that somewhere in the world, months or even a year ago, a pig virus jumped to a human and mutated, and has been spreading between humans ever since. Unlike with bird flu, doctors have no evidence suggesting a direct pig-to-human infection from this strain, which is why they haven’t recommended killing pigs.Medical detectives have not zeroed in on where the outbreak began. By March 9, the first symptoms were showing up in the Mexican state of Veracruz, where pig farming is a key industry in mountain hamlets and where small clinics provide the only health care.
The earliest confirmed case was there: a 5-year-old boy who was one of hundreds of people in the town of La Gloria whose flu symptoms left them struggling to breathe.
Days later, a door-to-door tax inspector was hospitalized with acute respiratory problems in the neighboring state of Oaxaca, infecting 16 hospital workers before she becameMexico’s first confirmed death.
Neighbors of the inspector, Maria Adela Gutierrez, said Wednesday that she fell ill after pairing up with a temporary worker from Veracruz who seemed to have a very bad cold. Other people from La Gloria kept going to jobs in Mexico City despite their illnesses, and could have infected people in the capital.
The deaths were already leveling off by the time Mexico announced the epidemic April 23. At hospitals Wednesday, lines of anxious citizens seeking care for flu symptoms dwindled markedly.
Cordova said getting proper treatment within 48 hours of falling ill “is fundamental for getting the best results” and said the country’s supply of medicine was sufficient.
Cordova has suggested the virus can be beaten if caught quickly and treated properly. But it was neither caught quickly nor treated properly in the early days in Mexico, which lacked the capacity to identify the virus, and whose health care system has become the target of widespread anger and distrust.
Swine flu has symptoms nearly identical to regular flu — fever, cough and sore throat — and spreads like regular flu — through tiny particles in the air — when people cough or sneeze. People with flu symptoms are advised to stay at home, wash their hands and cover their sneezes.
H1N1 swine flu is seen as the biggest risk since H5N1 avian flu re-emerged in 2003, killing 257 people of 421 infected in 15 countries. In 1968 a “Hong Kong” flu pandemic killed about 1 million people globally, and a 1957 pandemic killed about 2 million.
Seasonal flu kills 250,000 to 500,000 people in a normal year, including healthy children in rich countries.
While epidemiologists stress it is humans, not pigs, who are spreading the disease, sales have plunged for pork producers around the world. WHO says eating pork is safe, but Mexicans have even cut back on their beloved greasy pork tacos.
Authorities have sought to keep the crisis in context. In the U.S. alone, health officials say about 36,000 people die every year from flu-related causes.
link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30398682/
[...] re-opening offices, restaurants and other public venues that were closed to slow the spreading of Influenza A(H1N1). The President also stated, “cases are starting to [...]