Swine flu epidemic still spreading, says WHO
The World Health Organisation began to ship 2.4 million treatments of anti-flu drugs to 72 needy countries today, and its flu chief said the swine flu epidemic was still spreading.
WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda said new infections were among the 405 confirmed swine-flu cases reported to WHO in the last 24 hours.
“We are seeing testing of specimens that were collected from previous infections and then the laboratory work is catching up to it,” Fukuda said. “But we’re also seeing new infections occurring.”
“So, there’s both of these things going on simultaneously,” he told reporters.
The countries getting Tamiflu included Mexico, Afghanistan, Angola, Bhutan, Bolivia, Eritrea, Haiti, Moldova, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Zimbabwe, among others.
The drugs are from a stock of five million treatments of Tamiflu that manufacturer Roche Holding donated in 2005 and 2006, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said.
They were being shipped from Geneva and Basel in Switzerland, Maryland in the United States, and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
The global body says there were now 1,490 cases and 30 confirmed deaths from the swine flu epidemic. Of those, 822 cases and 29 deaths were in Mexico; the US had 403 cases and one death; Canada had 140 cases, Spain 57, Britain 27, Germany nine, New Zealand six and Italy five. Israel and France had four cases each, Korea and El Salvador had two each, and Austria, Hong Kong, Costa Rica, Colombia, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Switzerland had one case each.
Most of the people infected with the so-called A/H1N1 virus were young people in their mid-20s, Fukuda said, and most had been travelling to Mexico, the hardest-hit country.
Travel could also explain why mostly younger people appeared to be affected, as they tend to be the ones travelling, Fukuda said.
“With influenza, often we see the infections go to younger people first and then go to older people later,” Fukuda told reporters.
Another reason could be that older people already have some kind of protection against the virus from previous infections, he added.
Fukuda said patients who recovered from the new swine flu virus would be likely to gain some immunity to future outbreaks, if only for a few years.
“With influenza viruses, when you are infected it provides some protection against future influenza viruses similar to the one which infected you,” he said.
The protection lasts “a couple of years and then the viruses themselves change enough so that it’s kind of a new virus for your body so that you are susceptible again”.
The disease is affecting females and males equally, Fukuda said, and the incubation period has ranged from around one day to a week, the same as seasonal flu.
