HELSINKI - HEALTH experts on Saturday defended Mexico and the World Health Organisation (WHO) in their handling of swine flu, an outbreak that has sparked a global alert and is likely to cost billions of dollars.
In the first major medical forum since the H1N1 flu scare erupted on April 24, specialists said that, even though the threat so far had turned out to smaller than feared, Mexico and the WHO had acted correctly.
SWINE flu leapt into the spotlight on April 24, when the WHO announced around 800 suspected cases had been recorded in Mexico, along with seven cases in the United States.
On April 29, the WHO raised its alert level to five, calling on countries to prepare for an 'imminent' pandemic.
Their measures had placed the world on a stronger footing to combat the virus if it resurges in more lethal form, they said.
Didier Pittet, a University of Geneva professor of epidemiology and senior medical advisor on infection control to the WHO, said watchdogs had sounded the alarm on the basis of early data that suggested the pathogen could kill almost one in 10 of people who fell sick with it.
Such lethality placed the virus on a par with the so-called Spanish flu microbe that killed tens of millions in 1918-19, he said.
'There was a risk of a pandemic,' Prof Pittet told a press conference at the start of the European Conference on Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), an annual four-day forum in Helsinki gathering more than 8,000 doctors.
'The Mexican authorities were very, very courageous to start very quickly with social distancing, using the classic ways of containing a new virus and the risk of a pandemic. And then because the detection system worldwide had been improved, new cases were detected.'
A mathematical study, published in the US journal Science this week, showed that the virus, while contagious, has a case fatality rate at 0.4-0.6 per cent - far lower than feared although somewhat higher than a normal 'seasonal' flu.
'It's clear that we are facing a virus that is not the virus we were actually afraid of facing at the time of the initial testing,' Prof Pittet said. But, he said, the peril was far from resolved.
When the northern hemisphere, where the bulk of the world's population lives, starts its winter flu season some six months from now, the virus will have more opportunity to pick up genes from viral cousins, he said. It may become less virulent or just as equally become nastier, or possibly gain mutations making it immune to Tamiflu, the frontline drug against a flu pandemic, he warned. -- AFP
