Swine flu pandemic declared by World Health Organization

By Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times

The World Health Organization this morning acknowledged what many health experts have been saying for weeks: The outbreak of novel H1N1 virus is now a pandemic.

In a letter sent to its member countries, the WHO said it is officially raising its infectious diseases alert to Phase 6, its highest level, in recognition of the fact that the virus is now undergoing communitywide transmission in Australia as well as in North America. Such spread in two distinct regions of the world is the primary criterion for raising the alert level.

FOR THE RECORD:An earlier version of this article said emergency rooms in Chile had been overrun by people fearful that they had contracted the swine flu virus. Actually, emergency rooms in Argentina, not Chile, reported this trend.

But the agency said that the pandemic is only “moderate in severity” and cautioned against overreactions to the increased alert level.

The announcement marks the advent of the first global influenza epidemic in 41 years. The last one was the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968, which killed an estimated 1 million people worldwide.

So far, the H1N1 or swine flu pandemic this year has accounted for 27,737 laboratory-confirmed cases and 141 deaths, although health officials believe many times that number have been infected but have not been tested because their disease was mild.

A normal seasonal flu outbreak kills about 250,000 to 500,000 people worldwide.

In most industrialized countries, the rise in the alert level will have little practical effect because health authorities were already behaving as though a pandemic had been declared. In the United States, where there have been more than 13,000 cases and at least 27 deaths, “Our actions in the past month have been as if there was a pandemic in this country,” said Glen Nowak, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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