By Sue Chang
Jun 11, 2009, 10:17 a.m. EST
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/who-dec....
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The World Health Organization has informed its member nations that it is declaring a swine flu pandemic, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
This is the first global flu epidemic in 41 years, the news agency said. Swine flu, also known as H1N1 flu, has been reported in 74 countries, totaling 27,737 cases, including 141 deaths, according to an update from the WHO on Wednesday.
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WHO set to declare first flu pandemic since 1968
By Stephanie Nebehay
Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:39am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/i....
GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organization was poised on Thursday to declare that the new H1N1 virus has caused the first influenza pandemic in more than 40 years, health sources said on Thursday.
The move will trigger heightened health measures in the WHO's 193 member states as authorities brace for the worldwide spread of the virus that has so far caused mainly mild illness.
WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan was to hold a news conference on the outbreak at 1600 GMT.
Flu experts advising Chan, who met earlier on Thursday, were expected to recommend moving to the top phase 6 on the WHO's six-point scale, the sources said.
That would reflect the fact that the disease, widely known as swine flu, was spreading geographically, but not necessarily indicate how virulent it is.
"Phase 6, if we call a phase 6, doesn't mean anything concerning severity, it is concerning geographic spread ... Pandemic means global, but it doesn't have any connotation of severity or mildness," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.
"In fact, what we are seeing with this virus so far is overwhelmingly to date mild disease. So we would think that this event is really a moderate event for the time being, because the numbers are high but the disease is overwhelmingly mild," he told Reuters Television before the talks.
David Heymann, a former top WHO official now chairing Britain's Health Protection Agency, said that countries had tried to contain the virus through measures including school closures during the current phase 5. This has extended the precious time needed to prepare for a full-blown pandemic.
"During phase 5, the government and people in the U.K. have had the time to prepare for a pandemic -- this has hopefully decreased any surprise and concern that might be associated with a WHO announcement of phase 6, if one is made," he told Reuters.
As it spreads in humans, science cannot predict what course the virus will take, the disease it causes and the age groups infected, Heymann said. "The severity of that disease, the effectiveness of antiviral drugs and the stability of the virus must all be watched closely," he added.
A pandemic could cause enormous disruption to business as workers stay home because they are sick or to look after family members and authorities restrict gatherings of large numbers of people or movement of people or goods.
World markets shrugged off the possibility of a pandemic, as investors focused on possible global economic recovery.
AUSTRALIA LIKELY TRIGGER
Widespread transmission of the virus in Victoria, Australia, signaling that it is entrenched in another region besides North America, is likely to be the trigger for moving to phase 6.
Five people have been admitted to intensive care in Australia and more than 1,000 cases confirmed following widespread testing in the state.
"We have tested 5,500 people in the last two weeks, that is more people than we test in our whole influenza season," said Victorian state premier John Brumby.
One health source, who declined to be named, said the experts were also expected to recommend finishing production currently under way of seasonal flu vaccine for the northern hemisphere next winter.
"They might say finish seasonal vaccine and say begin pandemic vaccine as soon as it is feasible," he said.
Drugmakers have obtained the new influenza A (H1N1) seed virus in the past two weeks, enabling them to begin the production process by growing the virus in eggs.
Company officials said on Wednesday that they were on track to have a vaccine against the new strain ready for the northern hemisphere autumn.
Seasonal flu each year kills up to half a million people, mainly elderly, and causes severe illness in millions, so a premature switch in vaccine production to cope with the new strain could put many people at risk.
The new strain can be treated by antiviral drugs oseltamivir, the generic name of Roche Holding's Tamiflu tablets, and Relenza, a spray made by GlaxoSmithKline.
The strain, which emerged in April in Mexico and the United States, has spread widely in nations including Australia, Britain, Chile and Japan.
Authorities in Germany have confirmed 30 cases of H1N1 at a school in the industrial Rhineland city of Duesseldorf, the most concentrated outbreak of the virus so far in Europe's biggest economy.
There have been 27,737 infections reported in 74 countries to date, including 141 deaths, according to the WHO's latest tally of laboratory confirmed cases, but the real number of people with the disease is likely to run into at least hundreds of thousands, as mild cases may not have been detected.
A survey by New York City's health department showed that 6.9 percent of the city's population of over 8 million had experienced "flu-like illness" -- which could include other diseases -- in the first three weeks of May.
"The findings don't tell us exactly how many New Yorkers have had H1N1 influenza," said New York City Health Commissioner Dr Thomas Farley in a statement. "But they suggest it has been widespread, and mild in most affected people."
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WHO: Swine flu pandemic has begun, 1st in 41 years
BY MARIA CHENG and FRANK JORDANS, Associated Press Writer – 7 mins ago
GENEVA – The World Health Organization told its member nations it was declaring a swine flu pandemic Thursday — the first global flu epidemic in 41 years — as infections climbed in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America and elsewhere.
In a statement sent to member countries, WHO said it decided to raise the pandemic warning level from phase 5 to 6 — its highest alert — after holding an emergency meeting on swine flu with its experts......
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/un_un_swine_f....
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A Phase 6 declaration will = big problems at the airports
From PFI News Forum:
http://www.singtomeohmuse.com/viewtopic.....
Will OIA help out feds in the event of a pandemic?
By Scott Powers
Sentinel Staff Writer
June 9, 2009
Even as the swine-flu scare fades, Orlando International Airport and the rest of America's major airports are bracing for a potential disaster: a pandemic that requires them to quarantine international flights.
Under plans developed by the Bush administration — and now being re-evaluated by the Obama administration — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has set up standby quarantine/screening facilities at 19 airports to which all flights from affected countries would be diverted.
But OIA, which handles more than 1million arriving passengers per year from foreign airports, is not one of the 19. That means that in the event of a Phase 6 pandemic, all flights to Orlando from pandemic-affected countries could be rerouted to Miami, Atlanta, Houston or elsewhere.
Nationally, airline and airport lobbyists predict chaos, saying there is no way the air-traffic system can handle such extensive rerouting. Now, new proposals are emerging in Washington, including a "Plus 6" plan that would designate Orlando, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International and four other major airports as potential second-tier quarantine sites.
Federal officials have said little about the Plus 6 plan other than it is being considered. Local officials say they understand the CDC will approve the Plus 6 designations only if Orlando and the other airports pay for the quarantine facilities themselves.
The facilities aren't cheap. A 2008 study by the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that setting aside space for health screenings and a quarantine of up to 200 people could cost $15,000 per month, with costs of an actual quarantine running into the hundreds of thousands.
The quarantine stations at the 19 airports are paid for by the CDC.
Central Florida public-health officials and Orlando International officials say they have not yet decided whether they want anything to do with the Plus 6 plan.
Dr. Kevin Sherin, Orange County's top public-health official who was briefed on the national quarantine plan and the Plus 6 option by CDC officials at a recent Miami conference, briefed Orange County administrators.
"I want the decision-makers, the county leaders to realize this has implications for the community," said Sherin, the county health-department director. "I don't know if I'm taking a position on it, but if we're going to have a lot of international traffic we probably would want to have this capacity."
Officials at the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which operates OIA, said they want more information — but they're not sure whether they want to run a large-scale passenger-quarantine center.
No one has determined where the center might be set up — or where the money and public-health resources might come from. Quarantined passengers might have to remain for days to show they are not infectious.
"The airport is not a shelter. The airport is not an isolation facility. The airport is not a quarantine facility," said Tom D****r, GOAA's assistant director of operations for emergency response. "Our job is to move passengers."
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the SARS outbreak of 2003, the Bush administration decided to update the nation's 1970s-era plans for screening and quarantining foreign visitors, should a global health threat emerge.
The highest-level global threat is a Phase 6 pandemic, which the World Health Organization defines as widespread outbreaks of a potentially deadly, highly infectious disease in at least two regions of the world. This spring's outbreak of swine flu is now at at Phase 5 and could be declared a full-blown pandemic in the next few weeks.
The new federal strategy, which emerged in 2007, expanded the number of CDC-sponsored quarantine stations to 20, up from eight. Most are at airports. One, in El Paso, Texas, is at a land-border center.
The plan calls for all flights from countries identified by the WHO as pandemic countries to be diverted to the 19 airports. That plan now is considered the national strategy, CDC spokeswoman Shelly Sikes said.
However, the Air Transit Association, the trade group for airlines, and the Airports Council International-North America, the major trade group for airports, jointly asked the Obama administration in late March to reconsider the strategy.
They argued that funneling all international air traffic to just 19 airports could be chaotic. Besides needing to set up screenings for potentially tens of thousands of passengers, the airports would then have to put cleared passengers onto flights to their intended destinations. Flights would back up and delays would spread everywhere, predicted Katherine Andrus, assistant general counsel for the trade group.
"It would be like a very, very bad snowstorm hitting all airports with international arrivals at the same time," she said.
Sikes said the strategy and some of the proposed alternatives, including Plus6, are still on the table and that the administration is preparing a response to the concerns.
"One of the issues is, Plus 6, will it work, won't it work? There are a lot of varying opinions on it," Sikes said.
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Answered my own question about "quarantine stations". They are listed here:
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/d/quarantine_s....]
Anchorage
Atlanta
Boston
Chicago
Dallas/Ft. Worth
Detroit
El Paso
Honolulu
Houston
Los Angeles
Miami
Minneapolis
Newark
New York
Philadelphia
San Diego
San Francisco
San Juan
Seattle
Washington, DC
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June 9, 2009 - Even as the swine-flu scare fades...
June 11, 2009 - WHO declares level 6 pandemic...
Makes you wonder...
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Pilot,
This is a much bigger concern for international flights than domestic.
Even then, few countries are going to actually stop international travel.
The biggest impact in the short term, as far as I can tell, is when a passenger gets sick in route, the authorities may be quicker to divert or quarantine the entire passenger list.
There may be an increase in "at destination" fever testing.
To be quite frank, all of the level 6 plan protocols were different to start with. Couple that with the fact that they were developed with a highly lethal sickness in mind, and we've had a month of experience with a very low lethal sickness, and most administrators and .gov types are trying to figure out what is the best course of action.
The best plan, in my opinion, is to increase the watch level if you are a traveler, and have a plan B in case you or your plane are involuntarily quarantined.
Even the US has stated over and over again that in case of a pandemic, you are on your own.
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"The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one," Adolf Hitler
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I wonder about shorting airlines, or any transportation/vacation industry for that matter. The likelihood of .gov bailout billion$ is almost guaranteed for all affected industries.
Your thoughts?
So they made all these Woop Dee Doo plans without ever considering the real consequences. Yeah, sounds typical.
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Now this fly on the seat of our pants airport/pandemic plan (pun intentded) goes 2 ways right? Sick people can not come in, nor can they leave
Oops, forgot WE are the disease center of the world when it comes to this virus
Oh the stupidity, oh the shutting of the barn door
Is it just comical, I mean even with the seriousness what can you do but laugh at this point? US airports taking steps to screen peeps COMING IN
This is serious EPIC fail
One word for you Mr. Bloomberg -- RIKERS
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Hong Kong - All primary schools, kindergartens closed
The economic impact of mass closures in a JIT society is immense. If they close down schools with a minor illness, imagine what is going to happen with a major outbreak!
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/breaking_n....
Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen has announced that all primary and lower-level schools will close for a fortnight.
The decision for the two-week closure, effective from tomorrow, was made after a cluster of influenza-like cases at St Paul's Convent School was found to be swine flu infections.
The number of cases in the St Paul cluster was also raised to 12 from nine previously.
Authorities were unable to identify the source of the infection, making it the first cluster of human swine flu cases in the city without a known link to those travelling overseas, prompting the closures.
Primary schools, kindergartens and nurseries will be closed until the start of the next school year if they are unable to resume school before the end of the current school year on July 10.
The Education Bureau has reached an understanding with principals that special arrangements will be made for Primary Five examinations, a key factor in getting into a good secondary school, if schools have to stay closed until the start of the new school year.
The schools will be closed until June 25 and the bureau will confirm their reopening or announce changes in plans on June 23.
Territory-wide System Assessment exams, the Primary Six version of which is used by the Education Department to determine how many places in Band One schools to allocate to primary schools, scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday have been cancelled.
''Given the global situation, [for] Hong Kong to have its own local cases is simply inevitable,'' Tsang said.
''I believe the fellow citizens and the government have done all we can in postponing the arrival of the first indigenous case.''
The move to shut primary schools rather than secondary schools was made because young pupils are more vulnerable to catching the virus, Tsang said.
The closure affects nearly 510,640 students at 1,626 schools, according to enrollment figures from the 2008-2009 school year.
There have been around 50 confirmed cases of swine flu infection in Hong Kong, but all the previous cases caught the virus while travelling abroad.
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"The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one," Adolf Hitler
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