Health News Update

WHO: Swine flu pandemic in early days

It looks like it will be necessary to get that flu shot after all with the latest information in the health news reports.  Even though the press is not talking as much about the subject, there are still warnings and precautions about the Swine flu – H1N1 virus given out by the World Health Organization.  There has been a rise in the number of people who have been struck by the flu virus and an increasing number of deaths world wide.  For more information, please read further this article at the CBC News health site.

“The global swine flu epidemic is still in its early stages, even though reports of over 100,000 infections in England alone last week are plausible, the World Health Organization’s flu chief said Friday.

Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director-general for health security and environment, told The Associated Press that given the size of the world’s population, the new H1N1 virus is likely to spread for some time.

WHO earlier estimated that as many as two billion people could become infected over the next two years.

“Even if we have hundreds of thousands of cases or a few millions of cases …we’re relatively early in the pandemic,” Fukuda said in an interview at WHO’s headquarters in Geneva.

The global health agency stopped asking governments to report new cases last week, saying the effort was too great now that the disease has become so widespread in some countries.
Authorities in Britain say there were over 100,000 infections in England alone last week, while U.S. health officials estimate the United States has passed the one million case mark. Those figures dwarf WHO’s tally of 130,000 confirmed cases worldwide since the start of the outbreak last spring.

“We know that the total number of laboratory confirmed cases is really only a subset of the total number of cases,” Fukuda said.
Fukuda, the former chief of epidemiology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also said there must be no doubt over the safety of swine flu vaccines before they are given to the public.

Dramatic rise in H1N1 cases expected

Health officials and drug makers are looking into ways of speeding up the production of the vaccine before the Northern Hemisphere enters its flu season in the fall.
The first vaccines are expected in September and October, said Fukuda. Other vaccines will take until December or January before they are released onto the market — well into…”

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