The WHO was on high alert yesterday in the face of an outbreak of swine flu with alarming characteristics that has killed as many as 60 people in Mexico and also reached the US.
“The most worrying fact is that it appears to transmit from human to human,” a spokesman for the UN body, Thomas Abraham, said, adding that the swine flu virus had mutated into “a mix of genes that we have never seen before.”
Dave Daigle of the US Centers for Disease Control, which is working closely with the WHO, said a strain of bird flu, two of swine flu and one human strain had combined for the first time.
These features, along with the fact that unusually young and healthy adults have fallen victim — rather than the very old or very young — have given rise to fears of a serious epidemic, if not a pandemic.
Pigs are an ideal mixing vessel for flu viruses if simultaneously infected with more than one, which can combine within the animal to create a new, more virulent strain.
Pigs have already been factors in the appearance of two previously unknown strains that gave rise to pandemics in the last century, the WHO said.
Health authorities are also in a race against time as the illness is already fairly widespread.
In Mexico the main outbreak has hit the capital, Mexico City, with between 18 and 20 confirmed deaths because of the virus, but San Luis Potosi in the central part of the country, with three dead, and Mexicali on the US border, have also suffered cases of the disease.
The virus detected in 12 fatal Mexican cases is also genetically identical to that which affected eight people in California and Texas, though all of those recovered.
In addition, 75 students in New York showing flu-like symptoms have been undergoing tests, CNN reported.
Authorities in Mexico, where 40 more deaths are suspected to have resulted from the disease, and some 1,000 patients under observation, are already using the term epidemic, but the WHO has not yet gone so far.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan (陳馮富珍), who is a specialist on pandemics, returned from the US early yesterday and was expected to speak at an emergency meeting at the agency's Geneva headquarters later in the day.
Chan called the “virtual meeting” that will link public health authorities and experts in various parts of the world “to seek their advice and guidance,” WHO spokesman Fadela Chaib said.
The experts would not necessarily issue firm recommendations after the meeting. Once more details are clear about the virus and its risks, the emergency panel could recommend a change in the WHO's pandemic alert level — currently at 3 on a scale of 1 to 6 — or recommend travel advisories to control the flu's spread.
A pandemic occurs when there is a new virus to which few people have resistance, the virus is easily transmissible and sustainable within a population, causes severe illness and is spread over a wide geographical area.
Mexico has ordered schools and colleges shut, theaters and museums have also closed in the capital and two football games will be played today without spectators to avoid mass gatherings. Mexico City authorities initially announced a mass vaccination campaign using regular human flu vaccines, but later said that the WHO had advised them that it was better to use antiviral medicines.
“Vaccination is the second step,” Abraham said.
“At the moment, it should be possible to produce a vaccine since this virus has been identified,” he said. “But it will take some time.”
Some Asian countries enforced checks yesterday on passengers and pork products from Mexico amid fears that its deadly outbreak of swine flu might spread to a continent that has battled hard to contain bird flu.
Japan's biggest international airport stepped up health surveillance, while the Philippines said it may quarantine passengers with fevers who have been to Mexico. Health authorities in Thailand and Hong Kong said they were closely monitoring the situation.
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