First allow me to share with you what was said yesterday, June 2nd 2009 in Geneva at 17h00 their time by Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s assistant director-general of health security and environment in a Press Briefing for Medical Reporters.
First here is the report done by Jason Gale and John Lauerman of Bloomberg, both reporters have been following Emerging viruses for years and have as a motto in their Medical reports to Inform not to Inflame and are highly respected in the field for their professionalism.
Via Bloomberg
It’s a Pandemic, Experts Say; WHO Tweaks Label to Avoid Panic
[snip] Margaret Chan, the WHO’s director-general, will make the announcement sometime in the next 10 days, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deliberations are private. The agency, having spent the past five years alerting the world to the dangers of a pandemic, is now looking for a way to declare one without causing panic.
[snip] “The formalization of an influenza pandemic does have cascading consequences,” said Michael Leavitt, former U.S. health and human services secretary. “The decision ought not to be taken lightly,” Leavitt said in an interview. “The system of evaluating and triggering different levels of alert is still being refined at the WHO.”
[snip] Following the discussion, the WHO is considering a three- point scale to denote different levels of severity once phase 6 has been declared, Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s assistant director-general of health security and environment, said on a conference call with reporters yesterday. The agency should offer tailored guidance to countries on how to respond to a pandemic, said Fukuda and Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine in Washington.
[snip] Wake-Up Call
“WHO over the past few years has taught the public that a pandemic is a very dangerous thing,” Sandman said. “If you declare a disaster every time something small happens, then eventually declaring a disaster isn’t a wake-up call.”
As far as scientists are concerned, a flu pandemic isn’t defined by its severity. The key criterion is geographic. The WHO’s guidelines say a pandemic is imminent when a new virus causes outbreaks “in at least two countries in one WHO region” and it’s in progress when it’s widespread in “at least one other country in another WHO region.”
The new H1N1 flu strain, discovered in April, has turned up in 64 countries as far removed as Japan, Iceland and New Zealand. The virus is now starting to spread in Australia, Japan, U.K., Spain and Chile among people with no travel history and outside of schools and other institutional settings, Fukuda said.
I will do my best today as reports will come out to present you what it mean to be in a pandemic for our personnal reality.
I will do my best to shown you the domino, cascading effects of this declaration will have for each of us, because most people have not yet realised the scope and lasting impacts of such an Historical Event.
I will do my best to present as many aspects on our personnal Lives this pandemic will have in the short term, medium term and long term.
We are all in this together and it is all together that we will get the job done.
Snowy Owl
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