Phase 6 coming soon..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124264467449830071.html

The H1N1 flu virus is likely to keep spreading rapidly among people, within countries and across the globe, the head of the World Health Organization said on Monday.

Ministers and experts began a meeting in Geneva to discuss how to fight the virus with vaccines and drugs, as well as what would trigger the WHO to declare a full pandemic.

“For the first time in humanity, we are seeing, or we may be seeing, pandemic influenza evolving in front of our eyes,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan told her U.N. agency’s World Health Assembly.

Japan confirmed Monday that 125 people have been infected with the new strain. Most of the new infections were among high school students in the western prefectures of Hyogo and Osaka who hadn’t traveled abroad, the Health Ministry said.

Schools and kindergartens were closed across the two areas but local governments advised businesses to operate as usual. Kiosks at some stations in the region were closed, and a festival in the city of Kobe that usually attracts tens of thousands was canceled.

In New York, a school principal died from the new flu on Sunday, marking the city’s first death from the virus.

WHO said it is watching the situation in Japan closely, but it wasn’t clear yet whether the outbreak, the largest outside the Americas, would trigger a move to level 6, the highest on its global pandemic alert scale. WHO raised the alert to 5 last month.

Under WHO rules, signs that the disease is spreading in a sustained way in a second region of the world would prompt a declaration that a full pandemic is under way. Other large clusters have been seen in Spain and Britain.

Dr. Chan and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will meet top pharmaceutical executives on Tuesday to discuss their ability to make vaccines to fight the strain. Delegates will seek an agreement on how samples of the virus should be handled and shared with pharmaceutical companies.

Richard Besser, head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a high-level meeting during the week-long assembly that the virus had spread to nearly all 50 U.S. states and showed no signs of abating.

New York has recorded its first death from the virus and Chile reported two new cases, adding to its first two cases reported on Sunday. Initial tests showed the first suspected case in Greece, a Greek man traveling from the U.S., the Health Ministry said.

Forty countries have confirmed cases of the strain, a mix of swine, human and avian viruses. Almost all of the 74 dead were in Mexico, but mostly, people have had relatively mild symptoms.

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its inevitable now that phase 6 will happen..and with it the restrictive laws that will make all the elites happy as pigs in mud..and for how long will phase 6 stay in place?

401

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~ by seeker401 on May 20, 2009.