Swine Flu Travels to Poland as 1,893 Confirmed Ill (Update1)
By Tom Randall, Bloomberg
May 7 (Bloomberg) — A 58-year-old Polish woman was hospitalized with swine flu after returning home from a trip to New York, bringing the number of influenza cases worldwide to 1,893 in 24 countries.
In two weeks, swine flu jumped from isolated reports in the U.S. and Mexico to a widening circle of infections in Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and New Zealand and prompted quarantines to limit the outbreak. Hong Kong, which confirmed its first case of swine flu on May 1, and China are today releasing some people who were isolated after they were found to be on the same flight as the patient.
The World Health Organization, on the brink of declaring a pandemic, said a panel will meet May 14 to decide whether vaccine makers should begin producing hundreds of millions of doses of a separate swine flu shot. The virus, with symptoms similar to seasonal flu, is a new strain that’s dashing across a world population with little natural immunity, the WHO said.
“We are very early in the epidemic,” Marie-Paule Kieny, director of WHO’s initiative on vaccine research, said yesterday at a news conference in Geneva. “We have recommended for all manufacturers to put everything into place to be able to start manufacturing the vaccines.”…
Swine flu may affect at least one-third of the world’s 6 billion population within the next year, Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general of health, security and environment, said in a video broadcast from Geneva to a conference of Asian ministers in Bangkok today…
“I wish I could predict what we’re going to see in the fall, because that would make it very easy to make the kinds of decisions we’re going to need to make as a nation over the next couple of months,” Richard Besser, acting chief of the CDC, said yesterday. “We could see the current strain fizzle out and never come back again. We could see it mutate and change and come back in a more severe form. What we need to do is make sure we’re prepared.”…
The virus is milder than originally thought and has already rooted itself in communities across the country, making containment impossible, Besser said, explaining the school policy reversal. Even if symptoms remain mild, the ease with which the new virus spreads makes it a threat, he said.
The three main seasonal flu strains — H3N2, another form of H1N1, and type B — cause 250,000 to 500,000 deaths a year globally, according to the WHO. The new flu’s symptoms are similar: aches, coughing and fever…
Sanofi-Aventis SA of Paris, Baxter International Inc. of Deerfield, Illinois, and GlaxoSmithKline Plc of London are talking with world health authorities about producing shots, the agency said…
Full article here.
