World should prepare for severe flu

According to the World Health Organization chief, countries should be ready for more serious H1N1 flu infections and more deaths from the newly discovered virus. The highly contagious strain needs to be closely monitored in the southern hemisphere, where the winter season is beginning, as it could mix with seasonal influenza and mutate in 'unpredictable ways'.

In cases where the H1N1 virus is widespread and circulating within the general community, countries must expect to see more cases of severe and fatal infections.

According to the WHO's latest tally, the strain has infected more than 11,000 people in 42 countries, and killed 86 of them. The developing world needs to act quickly to improve their monitoring for the virus, which has caused mainly mild symptoms in most patients so far but could cause more serious effects as it spreads.

Also, there is little real difference between the WHO's current pandemic alert level of 5 and the highest of 6 in terms of preparedness measures taken. Pressure has been growing to factor in the severity of the newly-discovered disease as well as its geographic spread before sounding the pandemic alarm that could trigger unnecessary panic.

The WHO's guidelines define a pandemic solely on the basis of the pattern of its spread, and not on the symptoms a virus causes. Following those rules, it is needed to raise the alert level to Phase 6 as soon as H1N1 is shown to be spreading in a sustained way in one country outside of North America.

There are large pockets of infections in Japan, Spain and Britain, which have 294, 113 and 112 cases each, respectively. The virus, which is airborne like the common flu, is also continuing to pop up in new countries on a daily basis.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has also declared that H1N1 flu strain has spread to Taiwan, Kuwait, Iceland, Switzerland and Honduras, but with still few deaths outside of Mexico.