Word: phasing
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Which begs the question: Aren't we already there? When the WHO announced over a month ago that it was raising the pandemic alert to phase 5 (out of six phases), there were 114 confirmed cases in just a handful of countries, along with an unknown - though suspected to be large - number of infections in Mexico. That wasn't a huge total, but H1N1 was clearly spreading and it fit the WHO's very specific criteria for the pandemic phase to change from level 4 to level 5: it was a novel influenza virus that was sustaining human-to-human...
...criteria for phase 6, which signals a full pandemic, are just as specific, requiring sustained community-level outbreaks in at least one other country in a different region of the world (in this case, Australia...
...been quite mild shouldn't factor into the alert level - which Fukuda confirmed in a call with reporters today. With the sudden surge in cases in the southern hemisphere, however - where the winter flu season is about to begin - the global situation seems to fit the criteria for phase 6. But the WHO is still holding back...
...really getting close to a phase change," said Fukuda, but "we don't want people to panic if they hear we're in a pandemic situation...
...course, pandemic-alert levels are themselves fairly arbitrary categories. If and when the WHO moves to level 6, nothing meaningful will really have changed about the virus. But however arbitrary the alert levels are - and however unprecedented or confusing the H1N1 situation may be - the pandemic-phase system was devised by the WHO itself. So if the group allows itself to be influenced by political pressure or lets the alert levels become a simple judgment call from within the organization, then something will be lost. "The WHO is supposed to be an independent body we can all respect," says Osterholm...