WHO says swine flu pandemic might infect 2 billion
The World Health Organization reported today that should the current North American swine flu outbreak become a pandemic, it might affect a third of the world’s population. WHO’s Keiji Fukuda, an influenza expert, said that while there was no predicting at this point what will actually happen, a pandemic would probably infect about 2 billion people. To become a pandemic and thereby move the WHO’s health alert status for the disease outbreak to level 6—the top level—it would have to spread to another region of the world.
Should the swine flu move to Africa, for example, where poverty and starvation have weakend millions, pandemic status would almost be assured. According to reports out of Nigeria, over 2,000 people there have died of meningitis just since December. In March, the death count there was 333, meaning that approximately 1800 people have died of meningitis in Nigeria in just two months. Those figures provide some perspective on the amount of devastation an A(H1n1) influenza outbreak might wreak on the African continent.
So far, most of the world’s deaths from swine flu have occurred in Mexico, where it is reported that much of the population avoids medical care until it is too late, due to poverty. The situation in Africa, it is believed, would be even worse.
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