Word: alerting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Which begs the question: Aren't we already there? When the WHO announced over a month ago that it was raising the pandemic alert to phase 5 (out of six phases), there were 114 confirmed cases in just a handful of countries, along with an unknown - though suspected to be large - number of infections in Mexico. That wasn't a huge total, but H1N1 was clearly spreading and it fit the WHO's very specific criteria for the pandemic phase to change from level 4 to level 5: it was a novel influenza virus that was sustaining human-to-human...
...important to remember that the WHO's definition of a pandemic takes only transmissibility into account, not severity, so the fact that the disease has been quite mild shouldn't factor into the alert level - which Fukuda confirmed in a call with reporters today. With the sudden surge in cases in the southern hemisphere, however - where the winter flu season is about to begin - the global situation seems to fit the criteria for phase 6. But the WHO is still holding back...
...public reaction - like the severity of the flu - is not a stated factor in the WHO's pandemic-alert evaluation. And some independent experts have criticized the WHO for dragging its feet. They worry that, as new cases pile up and the WHO continues to hold the alert level at 5, the entire pandemic-rating system will lose all meaning - and the global body, which is probably the most respected of United Nations organizations, will lose valuable authority. "I'm afraid that they're about to go off the cliff of scientific credibility," says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center...
...course, pandemic-alert levels are themselves fairly arbitrary categories. If and when the WHO moves to level 6, nothing meaningful will really have changed about the virus. But however arbitrary the alert levels are - and however unprecedented or confusing the H1N1 situation may be - the pandemic-phase system was devised by the WHO itself. So if the group allows itself to be influenced by political pressure or lets the alert levels become a simple judgment call from within the organization, then something will be lost. "The WHO is supposed to be an independent body we can all respect," says Osterholm...
...September 2008, it did again, or so we’ve been told. Like the September seven years before, this one is said to have changed everything. That snapping sensation was almost certainly louder for ears tuned to a specific frequency—those of a graduating senior alert to any sounds of change. I was hearing it again in a phone call from Manhattan...