Swine Flu Watch: WHO update on the H1N1 pandemic
Still too early to declare swine flu pandemic over: WHO
It is too soon to decide whether to declare the H1N1 pandemic over, World Health Organization officials said Thursday.
While the number of infections and deaths are falling in Canada and the U.S., “that’s still not true for the entire Northern Hemisphere,” and it is impossible to know now whether the spring will bring a third wave of infection, Dr. Feiji Fukuda, special adviser to the WHO director-general on pandemic influenza said in a press briefing.
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“Overall, it’s too early to say whether activity is peaking in the Northern Hemisphere, and, at this point, it is also not possible to predict what we are going to be seeing in the spring time.”
And while new estimates suggest H1N1 is, overall, no more deadly than regular seasonal influenza, Dr. Fukuda warned that it is premature to declare how H1N1 will stack up against past pandemics.
The WHO says swine flu pandemic is milder than expected, may be nearing peak
Fukuda acknowledged that the virus has proved less lethal than authorities originally feared. “It is possible there could be unexpected events which occur as we go through” the pandemic, he said. But “it is quite possible to have a pandemic on the milder side and if we are experiencing that, and if the number of serious cases is kept down … this is something for which we should all be thankful.”
Fukuda said that more than 150 million doses of swine flu vaccine have now been distributed in about 40 countries. The United States, with at least 70 million doses, represents nearly half that total.
He also said that, so far, researchers have identified 96 patients with strains of the swine flu virus that are resistant to the most commonly used antiviral agent, Tamiflu, known generically as oseltamivir.
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New data from college campuses support the idea that swine flu may have passed its peak in the United States. For the week ending Nov. 27, there were only 1,076 new cases of influenza-like illnesses, generally presumed to be swine flu, among the nearly 3 million students covered in the survey, a 69% drop from the previous week.
