Posted on 06/11/2009 5:46:20 AM PDT by maquiladora
GENEVA (BNO NEWS) -- The World Health Organization concluded an emergency meeting on Thursday afternoon and is expected to declare a full scale swine flu pandemic within hours, BNO News has learned.
"The emergency meeting has finished," Sarah Russell, who is a spokeswoman for the health organization, told BNO News. Russell, who was not able to provide details on the outcome of the meeting, said Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan would be holding a press conference at 12 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. Geneva time). "The Director-General has decided to give a press conference at six so she can explain what is going on to everybody then," she said. The briefing will be held in the Executive Board room of the WHO headquarters in Geneva.
Russell said the council discussed a number of topics, including the pandemic alert scale. It is widely expected that the organization will now raise the pandemic alert level from 5 to 6, declaring the H1N1 flu virus, better known as swine flu, as a global pandemic. The disease has seen a sustained spread worldwide in the past month although most of the case have been mild.
Asked what a level 6 would mean, Russel said: "It means that an influenza pandemic is underway and a pandemic means that a virus which is new to humans has appeared, that its spreading, and that it is causing disease in many parts of the world."
The pandemic alert scale has seen a lot of criticism, especially since the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, as it does not reflect the severity of the outbreak. Russel said she was not aware of any plans to possibly change the criteria for the scale.
hide and lock up your wallet...
Ping...
Everything is a pandemic these days it seems.
So who’s imperial uberlord health czar
Glad I bought stock in 3M and Kimberly Clark (they make facemasks)
Sorry, still not going to support universal or Obama healthcare. No matter how hard you people try.
I hear even the American Medical Association is pulling their support for the Obama health care plan.
It can’t go anywhere now.
The only way we can stop this global pandemic that’s killed almost 200 is to build a wall of money around it.
What’s really bothering me about this strain of flu is that it continues to infect people when most flu strains typically decline during springtime and summer. If memory recalls, the Spanish flu acted similarly its first season of outbreak only to come back with a vengeance in much more lethal condition the next fall.
Funny, I don’t know anyone who has the “swine flu” or any other form of flu...not exactly a “pandemic” in Houston.
In the 1918–1919 pandemic, a first or spring wave began in March 1918 and spread unevenly through the United States, Europe, and possibly Asia over the next 6 months (Figure 1). Illness rates were high, but death rates in most locales were not appreciably above normal. A second or fall wave spread globally from September to November 1918 and was highly fatal. In many nations, a third wave occurred in early 1919 (21). Clinical similarities led contemporary observers to conclude initially that they were observing the same disease in the successive waves. The milder forms of illness in all 3 waves were identical and typical of influenza seen in the 1889 pandemic and in prior interpandemic years. In retrospect, even the rapid progressions from uncomplicated influenza infections to fatal pneumonia, a hallmark of the 1918–1919 fall and winter waves, had been noted in the relatively few severe spring wave cases. The differences between the waves thus seemed to be primarily in the much higher frequency of complicated, severe, and fatal cases in the last 2 waves.
But 3 extensive pandemic waves of influenza within 1 year, occurring in rapid succession, with only the briefest of quiescent intervals between them, was unprecedented. The occurrence, and to some extent the severity, of recurrent annual outbreaks, are driven by viral antigenic drift, with an antigenic variant virus emerging to become dominant approximately every 2 to 3 years. Without such drift, circulating human influenza viruses would presumably disappear once herd immunity had reached a critical threshold at which further virus spread was sufficiently limited. The timing and spacing of influenza epidemics in interpandemic years have been subjects of speculation for decades. Factors believed to be responsible include partial herd immunity limiting virus spread in all but the most favorable circumstances, which include lower environmental temperatures and human nasal temperatures (beneficial to thermolabile viruses such as influenza), optimal humidity, increased crowding indoors, and imperfect ventilation due to closed windows and suboptimal airflow.
However, such factors cannot explain the 3 pandemic waves of 1918–1919, which occurred in the spring-summer, summer-fall, and winter (of the Northern Hemisphere), respectively. The first 2 waves occurred at a time of year normally unfavorable to influenza virus spread. The second wave caused simultaneous outbreaks in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres from September to November. Furthermore, the interwave periods were so brief as to be almost undetectable in some locales. Reconciling epidemiologically the steep drop in cases in the first and second waves with the sharp rises in cases of the second and third waves is difficult. Assuming even transient postinfection immunity, how could susceptible persons be too few to sustain transmission at 1 point and yet enough to start a new explosive pandemic wave a few weeks later? Could the virus have mutated profoundly and almost simultaneously around the world, in the short periods between the successive waves? Acquiring viral drift sufficient to produce new influenza strains capable of escaping population immunity is believed to take years of global circulation, not weeks of local circulation. And having occurred, such mutated viruses normally take months to spread around the world......
“Never let a good crisis go to waste. If there is no crisis, create one artificially.”
FYI ping
What is the death rate of people who get this strain of flu?
What is the death rate of people who get other types of flu?
What makes this particular flu any different? (Besides media coverage)
P.S.: don't mention you city as being free of the pandemic, they will make sure will be. No pandemic here as well.
See post 12. This is a flu virus that crossed from animal to human host (alarm 1), and can be spread from human to human (alarm 2, unlike Bird Flu), and is following the pattern of the 1918 influenza outbreaks and pandemic (alarm 3), also it is showing up, scattered, in many countries (alarm 4).
These four things makes the experts very worried. It’s not following the usual influenza pattern.
“it’s a diversion for something Obama else has in mind.”
Obama had Rahm call WHO and ask for a diversion?
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