The H1N1 flu strain is spreading fast in Japan, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Monday, and ministers and top officials in Geneva discussed how to fight pandemic flu with drugs and vaccines.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the flu outbreak that has put the world on the brink of a pandemic needed to be tackled with the utmost seriousness, because there were still many unknowns about which path it will take.
”We are all under pressure to make urgent and far-reaching decisions in an atmosphere of considerable scientific uncertainty,” she told her United Nations agency’s World Health Assembly.
Richard Besser, the head of the United States Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said the new H1N1 virus continued to spread widely in the US.
”Our best analysis suggests that this novel H1N1 virus is likely to circulate worldwide, similar to other seasonal flu viruses,” he told a high-level meeting during the WHO’s annual World Health Assembly.
Assembly delegates, including Mexico’s Health Minister Jose Angel Cordoba, were to discuss how best to respond to the H1N1 flu, which has caused mild symptoms in most of the 8 829 patients infected to date and killed 74 people.
They will also seek an agreement on how samples of the virus should be handled and shared with pharmaceutical companies working to develop vaccines to fight the strain, which is a genetic mixture of swine, bird and human viruses.
Rich and poor countries remain at odds over whether the biological material can be patented. The meeting will also discuss poor countries’ needs for antiviral drugs such as Roche’s Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza and any vaccines developed to confront the strain.
Japan affected
Chan, who fought bird flu and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) as Hong Kong’s health director, increased the WHO’s pandemic alert level to Phase 5 last month in response to the spread of H1N1 in North America, which has had 95% of the nearly 9 000 confirmed infections to date.
Under the UN agency’s rules, signs that the disease is spreading in a sustained way in a second region of the world would prompt a declaration that a full pandemic is under way.
Keiji Fukuda, acting WHO assistant director-general, said young people had been most prone to H1N1, and those suffering severe respiratory disease or dying as a result of infection have been primarily in the 20 to 40 age range.
WHO laboratories have confirmed 125 cases in Japan, making it the largest cluster of H1N1 outside of the Americas, followed by Spain with 103 and Britain with 101, he told the session.
Most of those cases have been deemed related to travel or restricted within schools, and not examples of the new virus spreading freely in broad communities, according to the WHO.
The virus has been identified in 40 countries so far. Most patients have had relatively mild symptoms, such as fever, cough, headache and body aches, while pregnant women and people with other health problems like diabetes have been prone to more severe effects such as pneumonia.
A WHO designation of Phase 6 flu would put countries on even higher alert about the flu strain and give more impetus to pharmaceutical efforts to create drugs and vaccines to fight it.
Chan and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon meet top pharmaceutical executives on Tuesday to discuss their ability to make vaccines to fight the H1N1 strain.
About 20 companies worldwide including Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis and Baxter International currently produce flu vaccines. Making a pandemic jab could require them to cut production of vaccines for seasonal flu, which kills between 250 000 and 500 000 people a year. — Reuters