WHO Raises Swine Flu Threat Level

Solarch writes "Late in the afternoon on Wednesday, the WHO raised the pandemic threat level for H1N1 "swine flu" to 5. Global media outlets(such as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC) preempted normal broadcast coverage and immediately published stories on their websites. To clarify, the WHO's elevation is mainly a sign to governments that the virus is spreading quickly and that steps should be taken on a governmental level to stage supplies and medicines to combat a possible pandemic. Unfortunately, broadcast coverage focused on phrases like 'pandemic imminent' (CNN marquee). In other news, patient zero, the medical term for the initial human vector of a disease, has been tentatively identified in Mexico."

Comments

Re:not easy to know how to respond

[clang_jangle]

I read an article a couple days ago, apparently there was a swine flu outbreak in 1976, and the US was quite proactive in stopping it

The U.S. didn't stop it, it just never materialized. Like the bird flu scare they were trying to sell just recently. ISTR the CDC says 36,000 people die in the U.S. yearly from ordinary flu, and so far one person in the U.S. has died from this "swine flu" -- and that was a two year old Mexican national in Texas. But surely this scare is working out well for the health care industry...