Swine flu: WHO on high alert

2009-04-25 14:41

Geneva - The World Health Organisation was on high alert on Saturday in the face of an outbreak of swine flu with alarming characteristics that has killed up to 60 people in Mexico and also infected the United States.

"The most worrying fact is that it appears to transmit from human to human," a spokesperson for the UN body, Thomas Abraham, told AFP, adding that the swine flu virus had mutated into "a mix of genes that we have never seen before."

Dave Daigle, of the US Centres for Disease Control, which is working closely with the WHO, said a bird flu strain, two swine flu strains and a human strain had combined for the first time.

These features, along with the fact that unusually young healthy adults have fallen victim, and not the very old or very young, have given rise to fears of a serious epidemic, if not a pandemic.

The pig is 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.

According to the WHO, pigs have already been factors in the appearance of two previously unknown strains that gave rise to pandemics in the last century.

Illness already widespread

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 due to the virus, but San Luis Potosi in the centre, 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 the US states of California and Texas, though all of those recovered.

In addition 75 students in New York showing flu-like symptoms have been undergoing tests, according to CNN.

Authorities in Mexico, where 40 more deaths are suspected to have resulted from the disease, and some 1 000 patients are under observation, are already using the term epidemic, but the WHO has not yet gone so far.

WHO Director General Margaret Chan, who is a specialist on pandemics, returned from the United States early Saturday and was expected to speak at the agency's Geneva headquarters later in the day.

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, and causes severe illness.

Mexico has ordered schools and colleges shut, theatres and museums have also closed in the capital and two football games will be played Sunday without spectators to avoid mass gatherings of people.

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," WHO spokesperson Abraham said.

"At the moment, it should be possible to produce a vaccine since this virus has been identified," he added. "But it will take some time."

- AFP