GENEVA – The World Health Organization declared a swine flu pandemic Thursday — the first global flu epidemic in 41 years — as infections in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere climbed to nearly 30,000 cases.
The long-awaited pandemic announcement is scientific confirmation that a new flu virus has emerged and is quickly circling the globe. WHO will now ask drugmakers to speed up production of a swine flu vaccine, which it said would available after September. The declaration will also prompt governments to devote more money toward efforts to contain the virus.
WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan made the announcement Thursday after the U.N. agency held an emergency meeting with flu experts. Chan said she was moving to phase 6 — the agency’s highest alert level — which means a pandemic, or global epidemic, is under way.
“The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century,” Chan told reporters. “The virus is now unstoppable.”
“However, we do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of severe and fatal infections,” she added.
On Thursday, WHO said 74 countries had reported 28,774 cases of swine flu, including 144 deaths. Chan described the danger posed by the virus as “moderate.”
The agency has stressed that most cases are mild and require no treatment, but the fear is that a rash of new infections could overwhelm hospitals and health authorities — especially in poorer countries.
Still, about half of the people who have died from swine flu were previously young and healthy — people who are not usually susceptible to flu. Swine flu is also crowding out regular flu viruses. Both features are typical of pandemic flu viruses.
The last pandemic — the Hong Kong flu of 1968 — killed about 1 million people. Ordinary flu kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people each year.
Swine flu is also continuing to spread during the start of summer in the northern hemisphere. Normally, flu viruses disappear with warm weather, but swine flu is proving to be resilient.
“What this declaration does do is remind the world that flu viruses like H1N1 need to be taken seriously,” said Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, warning that more cases could crop up in the fall.
“We need to start preparing now in order to be ready for a possible H1N1 immunization campaign starting in late September,” she said in a statement from Washington.
Chan said WHO was now recommending that flu vaccine makers start making swine flu vaccine. Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC said they could start large-scale production of pandemic vaccine in July but that it would take several months before large quantities would be available.
Glaxo spokesman Stephen Rea said the company’s first doses of vaccine would be reserved for countries who had ordered it in advance, including Belgium, Britain and France. He said the company would also donate 50 million doses to WHO for poor countries.
Pascal Barollier, a spokesman for Sanofi-Aventis, said they were also working on a pandemic vaccine but WHO had not yet asked them to start producing mass quantities of it.
The pandemic decision might have been made much earlier if WHO had more accurate information about swine flu’s rising sweep through Europe. Chan said she called the emergency meeting with flu experts after concerns were raised that some countries like Britain were not accurately reporting their cases.
Chan said the experts unanimously agreed there was a wider spread of swine flu than what was being reported.
Chan would not say which country tipped the world into the pandemic, but the agency’s top flu expert, Dr. Keiji Fukuda, said the situation from Australia seemed to indicate the virus was spreading rapidly there — up to 1,260 cases late Wednesday.
Many health experts said the world has been in a pandemic for weeks but WHO became bogged down by politics. In May, several countries urged WHO not to declare a pandemic, fearing it would cause social and economic turmoil.
“This is WHO finally catching up with the facts,” said Michael Osterholm, a flu expert at the University of Minnesota.
Despite WHO’s hopes, Thursday’s announcement will almost certainly spark panic about spread of swine flu in some countries.
Fear has already gripped Argentina, where thousands of people worried about swine flu flooded into hospitals this week, bringing emergency health services in the capital of Buenos Aires to the brink of collapse. Last month, a bus arriving in Argentina from Chile was stoned by people who thought a passenger on it had swine flu.
Chile has the most swine flu cases in South America, and the southern hemisphere is moving into its winter flu season.
In Hong Kong on Thursday, the government ordered all kindergartens and primary schools closed for two weeks after a dozen students tested positive for swine flu. The decision affected over half a million students.
In the United States, where there have been more than 13,000 cases and at least 27 deaths from swine flu, officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the move would not change how the U.S. tackled swine flu.
“Our actions in the past month have been as if there was a pandemic in this country,” Glen Nowak, a CDC spokesman, said Thursday.
The U.S. government has already increased the availability of flu-fighting medicines and authorized $1 billion for the development of a new swine flu vaccine. In addition, new cases seem to be declining in many parts of the country, U.S. health officials say, as North America moves out of its traditional winter flu season.
Still, New York City reported three more swine flu deaths Thursday, including one child under 2, one teenager and one person in their 30s.
“Countries where outbreaks appear to have peaked should prepare for a second wave of infection,” Chan warned, adding that the virus could mutate “without rhyme or reason, at any time.”
In Mexico, where the epidemic was first detected, the outbreak peaked in April. Mexico now has less than 30 cases reported a day, down from an average of 300, Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova told The Associated Press. Mexico has confirmed 6,337 cases, including 108 deaths.
Cordova said he is concerned that other countries were not taking drastic measures to stop its spread like Mexico, which closed schools, restaurants, theaters, and canceled public events. He said the Mexican government has strengthened its detection system to spot cases in most of its 32 states to prepare for a possible second wave of infections in the winter.
“There’s much anxiety over how the virus will act in the Southern Hemisphere, because the zone is currently showing a large number of new cases, in particular Australia, Chile and Argentina,” Cordova said.
Many experts said the declaration of a pandemic did not mean the virus was getting deadlier.
“People might imagine a virus is now going to rush in and kill everyone,” said John Oxford, a professor of virology at St. Bart’s and Royal London Hospital. “That’s not going to happen.”
But Oxford said the swine flu virus might evolve into a more dangerous strain in the future.
“That is always a possibility with influenza viruses,” he said. “We have to watch very carefully to see what this virus does.”
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