Word: flu
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What is puzzling, however, is the WHO's decision to escalate the alert now, when the world has most likely missed its chance to contain the virus. When the WHO's pandemic alert system was first conceived, phase 4 was intended to indicate the moment when a new flu virus had been identified and could spread effectively from person to person (as Asia's H5N1's bird flu virus, which reached phase 3, has never been able to do), but was still limited enough that health officials could launch a global effort to contain it and snuff it out with...
...clearly too late for that now - the swine flu virus has jumped across borders, and both the WHO and CDC have acknowledged that containment is no longer an option. So, while raising the alert level, the WHO also recommended that countries do not close borders or impose travel bans. "Restricting travel would have very little effect on stopping the movement of this virus," said Fukuda. At this point, trying to close borders would be like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted - better to focus on community-level protections like better disease surveillance and hygiene. (Read "Battling Swine...
...there are more questions than answers. Most important among them: Exactly what is going on in Mexico, where epidemiologists are still working to understand the swine flu outbreak? Uncertainty, however, is unavoidable when it comes to influenza - a shifty, erratic virus that is harder to get a handle on than, well, a greased pig. "There is no standard picture for how this will develop," said Fukuda. "We don't know...
Read "How to Deal with Swine Flu: Heeding the Mistakes...
...order to address student perspectives and queries. Discussion ranged from global and national health policy issues to Zucker’s personal perspective in these fields and the journey that brought him to his current position. He also referred briefly to possible long-term effects of the current swine flu outbreak on health policy, as many of the WHO’s resources are being aimed at that problem. “All this energy gets directed towards a crisis like this,” he says, “But then after that the energy can be dissipated...