GENEVA (Reuters) – Humanity may be witnessing an influenza pandemic unfold, the head of the World Health Organization said yesterday, as Japan reported a big jump in infections with the newly-discovered H1N1 virus.
Flu fears dominated the start of the WHO’s annual congress in Geneva, where many of the 40 countries touched by the flu strain urged the United Nations agency to rethink its pandemic alert scale that is now at the second-highest notch.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the outbreak that began in North America and has stretched to Europe, Asia and South America needed to be tackled with seriousness even though its symptoms appear to be largely mild.
“For the first time in humanity, we are seeing, or we may be seeing, pandemic influenza evolving in front of our eyes,” Chan told the World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva, where rich and poor governments discussed their drug, vaccine and other needs.
“We are all under pressure to make urgent and far-reaching decisions in an atmosphere of considerable scientific uncertainty,” Chan told the annual congress, which was shortened in length to allow health ministers to go home earlier and resume their monitoring for flu infections.
Several topics including food safety and viral hepatitis were dropped from the agenda while drug-resistant tuberculosis was initially slated to be postponed and then re-added at the last moment with support from China and others.
According to the WHO’s latest tally, 74 people have died from H1N1 infection. Most of the other nearly 9,000 patients have suffered mild effects like fever and diarrhea from the bug that is a genetic mix of swine, bird and human viruses.
But its rapid spread between people and across countries has caused the WHO to raise the alert and declare a pandemic is “imminent,” a designation that reflects views on the way the new virus is spreading and not the seriousness of its effects.
Mexico, Britain, China, Egypt, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates were among those who called at the opening-day session for the WHO to rethink its criteria for declaring a pandemic, which under current rules would occur when the virus is spreading in a sustained way in two regions of the world.
British Health Secretary Alan Johnson said the “mechanistic process” now in place seems to give the wrong public impression about the seriousness of the flu, which can be treated without drugs in most cases.
Chan, who also fought bird flu and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in her tenure as Hong Kong health director, said she would consider the request that came just as the number of infections in Japan, Britain and Spain approached critical mass.
The WHO said its laboratories have confirmed 125 cases in Japan, 103 in Spain and 101 in Britain.
Officials from its North American stronghold said the virus was still spreading, albeit in a seemingly less virulent form.
Richard Besser, head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a high-level session that the H1N1 strain has reached nearly all 50 US states and was likely to circulate worldwide.
“While we are not seeing the seriousness of illness that was initially reported in Mexico, the outbreak is not over,” he said. Mexico’s Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova said there was a slow but steady fall in the number of cases in his country.
If H1N1 flu does reach all corners of the world, the WHO’s Chan said there would be certain communities at particular risk — including people living in slums and shantytowns, pregnant women, and patients with HIV and other health problems.
Poor countries are seeking international assistance to get drugs, diagnostic tests and medical personnel needed to combat an outbreak which has so far not been identified in Africa or in the world’s most impoverished areas.
Developing nations are also negotiating fair access to antiviral drugs like Tamiflu and to any vaccines developed to fight the H1N1 strain.
Officials will also seek an agreement on how samples of the virus should be handled and shared with pharmaceutical companies working to develop vaccines to fight the strain.
The WHO’s Chan is due to hold meetings today with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and top executives from several pharmaceutical companies, which are waiting for a signal about whether to start making H1N1 jabs or to include the strain in the seasonal flu vaccine mix.
