WHO Defends Flu Response Amid Exaggeration Claims

Mortality from the new H1N1 strain is “unquestionably higher” than the death toll reported by national authorities, the Geneva-based agency said in a report seen by Bloomberg News before its scheduled publication today. Deaths totaled more than 7,820 as of Nov. 22, said WHO, which estimates as many as 500,000 people die each year from seasonal strains.

Health authorities worldwide are assessing whether their response to swine flu is justified by its threat as cases of flu-like illness retreat in the U.S. and U.K. While a majority of patients recover within days and reported fatalities are a fraction of the seasonal flu toll, these figures mask the full impact of swine flu on society, WHO said.

“Compared with seasonal influenza, the H1N1 virus affects a much younger age group in all categories — those most frequently infected, hospitalized, requiring intensive care, and dying,” WHO said in the report.

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“If you look at years of personal life lost, it’s much higher, and that’s the point we have to get across,” Osterholm said in a telephone interview today. “A death in an otherwise healthy 24-year-old, to me, is a major defeat for society.”

Full Article: here.

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.