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WHO

WHO’s pandemic alert levels.

The director-general of the WHO is likely to declare a full-blown flu pandemic in the next few weeks, Bloomberg News is reporting today, citing three unnamed sources.

Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s top flu official, publicly suggested something similar yesterday, when he said that the WHO is “getting closer” to upping the pandemic-alert level to Phase 6.

Phase 6 — full-blown pandemic — would mean that a new strain of flu is spreading widely through communities in more than one part of the world. We seem to be pretty close, with widespread transmission established in the Americas, and hundreds of confirmed cases in the U.K., Australia and Japan, some of which are not linked to travelers who have been to the U.S. or Mexico. Fukuda said the spread of the disease in those countries isn’t yet wide enough to declare a pandemic, but it could be soon.

The subtext here has to do with the frightening connotations of the word “pandemic” coupled with the fact that, so far, this flu outbreak has been relatively mild in most cases. (We’re currently at Phase 5, which means a pandemic is imminent.) And, as we noted a while back, it’s possible to have a relatively mild pandemic, strange as that sounds.

So the WHO has to balance the epidemiological reality of widespread transmission, the need to avoid causing undue panic and the importance of maintaining vigilance, given that the H1N1 flu could become more severe.

One possibility, Bloomberg notes, is to add a separate scale that would indicate levels of severity once the outbreak reaches Phase 6. That might do a bit to clear up the confusion, and help separate the measure of the spread of disease from measure of its severity.

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WHO Could Soon Declare Flu Pandemic