All Nature’s pandemic flu coverage is collected on our news special page. These regular updates on The Great Beyond round up the latest from other news sources around the globe.
Not a great deal of news from today’s World Health Organization (WHO) media briefing on pandemic flu, the first WHO has held subsequent to its declaring of a pandemic on 11 June. The virus has now been officially renamed by WHO and other international agencies as “pandemic (H1N1) 2009” virus. It was initially called ‘swine flu’ but WHO changed that to A/H1N1 to avoid stigmatising the pig industry, but A/H1N1 wasn’t much good either, as that’s also the name of one of the currently circulating seasonal flu strains.
WHO also says it will issue in the next few days new surveillance recommendations for countries, recommending lab confirmation of cases to be abandoned, except for the few countries that have not yet reported the disease in their territories, and switch to population-based surveillance of proxies of the amount of disease such as how many people are treated for influenza-like illness or are hospitalized for the same.
I explained this logic back in 21 May, here.
Excerpt:
“Now that swine flu is everywhere in the United States, the CDC says that counting confirmed cases has become largely irrelevant. It has switched instead to its traditional surveillance systems for monitoring flu-like symptoms by looking for patterns, clusters and changes in flu activity nationwide. Other countries will surely follow suit as their outbreaks progress. Heavy surveillance teamed with rapid isolation and treatment of individual cases only makes sense at the very earliest stage of an outbreak in a region, when there is a possibility of slowing the initial spread. It becomes irrelevant once the virus is spreading widely within the community, as it is in the United States.”
China and many other countries are now shifting from contain to mitigation strategies, some, such as the UK, belatedly.
One side-benefit of the move away from testing cases is that it may also stop the many in the media’s obsession with reporting confirmed case numbers, as these counts now mean nothing. I expanded on this 19 June here.
Nonsensical numbers
Excerpt:
“The World Health Organization’s last formal update on 17 June of lab confirmed cases reported by member states stood at around 40,000 lab confirmed cases and 167 deaths. With a pandemic underway, and extensive spread in the population in many countries such case numbers are now fairly meaningless though, as lab confirmed case numbers are but the tip of the iceberg . The US has around 18,000 lab confirmed cases, for example, but CDC expects the real figure is in the hundreds of thousands; CDC has stopped counting cases, and switched to population surveillance of influenza-like illness and other measures“.
Lab confirmatory tests will now only be done for severe cases, unusual clusters, or cases with previously unreported symptoms
Meanwhile, WHO’s expert group (SAGE) Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization is meeting this week to discuss vaccine decisions, with its conclusions expected to be made public in a few days. The pandemic flu continues to spread rapidly in the Southern Hemisphere with high activity in Chile and Argentina, and WHO is keeping a close eye on events as it’s still a few weeks before the Southern flu season enters its peak phase.