WHA - World Health Assembly, Geneva - Various Media Reports

[FrenchieGirl]

Perhaps we can collect some of the outstanding reports in the media that pertain to this week's World Health Assembly, being held at WHO HQ in Geneva Switzerland.

The first I found is below.

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Health ministers focus on pandemic flu and vaccines

Mon May 18, 2009 4:51pm IST
By Katie Reid and Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - Health ministers from around the world agreed to drop nearly everything but pandemic flu from their annual congress agenda on Monday, so they can go home sooner to monitor the H1N1 strain that is now affecting Japan.

The new virus that killed 66 people in its epicenter Mexico has caused infections in at least 39 countries and caused the World Health Organization to say a pandemic is imminent.

"As we meet today, influenza A/H1N1 is at our doors," Leslie Ramsammy, Guyana's health minister told the assembly, which will now end on Friday instead of next Wednesday.

The delegates including Mexico's health minister Jose Angel Cordoba will spend this week discussing how to best respond to the H1N1 flu, which has caused mild symptoms in most of the 8,480 people infected to date.

They will also seek an agreement on how samples of the virus should be handled and shared with pharmaceutical companies working to develop vaccines to fight the strain, which is a genetic mixture of swine, bird and human viruses.

Rich and poor countries remain at odds over issues such as whether the biological material can be patented. The meeting will also discuss poor countries' needs for antiviral drugs like Roche's Tamiflu and GlaxoSmithKline's Relenza and any vaccines developed to confront the strain.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan increased the global pandemic alert last month by two steps to Phase 5 in response to the spread of H1N1 flu in North America, where it has infected the most people and caused the most severe effects.

JAPAN AFFECTED

Under the U.N. agency's 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 underway.

According to the latest WHO tally, there have been 103 confirmed H1N1 infections in Spain and 82 in Britain, the two largest pockets outside of North America. Most have been deemed imported cases or infections spreading in schools, and not in the broad community.

The seven confirmed cases in Japan, the largest concentration so far in Asia aside from nine in New Zealand, also appear to be linked to schools, according to the WHO.

Phase 6 flu would put countries on even higher alert about the disease and give more impetus to pharmaceutical efforts to create drugs and vaccines to fight its spread.

On Tuesday, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will meet top pharmaceutical executives to discuss their ability to make vaccines to fight the H1N1 strain.

About 20 companies worldwide including Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis and Baxter International currently make flu vaccines. Making a pandemic jab could require them to cut production of vaccines for seasonal flu, which kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people a year.

(Editing by Jon Boyle)

[FrenchieGirl]

Re: WHA - World Health Assembly, Geneva - Various Media Reports

Swine flu not yet a full-blown pandemic, UK and Japan tell WHO


Countries fear raising alert from phase 5 to pandemic could affect fight against other flu viruses

Sarah Boseley, health editor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 May 2009 18.47 BST
Article history

Britain and Japan today tried to stave off any move to classify swine flu as a full-blown pandemic, arguing at the World Health Assembly in Geneva that the spread of the infection should not automatically cause an escalation in the global response.

"We need to give you and your team more flexibility as to whether we move to phase 6," the UK health secretary, Alan Johnson, told Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organisation.

Even though Japan now has more than 130 cases, mostly among teenagers, and has closed 2,000 schools and cancelled public events, it argued the WHO's alert system should be changed so that a pandemic would be declared only when the virus starts to be transmitted outside of institutions such as schools, where it inevitably passes around very quickly.

Although more than 8,829 cases have been reported worldwide, only 76 people have died, 68 of whom were in Mexico. The eight others, in the US, Canada and Costa Rica, all had other underlying medical conditions. The most recent deaths included a teacher in New York, Mitchell Wiener, 55, who died at the weekend.

If the WHO declares the swine flu alert should move up from the current phase 5 to the highest level of phase 6, a whole raft of new measures and precautions will be triggered. The worry for the UK will be the requirement for vaccine manufacturers to switch production from the seasonal flu jab to a vaccine specifically against the H1N1 swine flu strain.

The swine flu at the moment appears to cause a mild illness, whereas the flu strains that arrive in the winter can kill thousands of elderly and vulnerable people.

Chan told the assembly that the epidemic is in "a grace period" and said she does not want to raise the alert to phase 6 yet. However, she added that nobody could tell how long this stage of the epidemic would last. The danger, she said, is that swine flu could mix with other flu strains, such as H5N1 bird flu, and become far more lethal.

Scientists could argue that the conditions for phase 6 have already been met, with extensive transmission across the US, which has nearly 5,000 confirmed cases, and easy passage between countries.

The US, which does not have an all-embracing healthcare system which can easily diagnose and treat all those infected, is no longer able to contain the spread.

Dr Richard Besser, acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the meeting the outbreak is "not winding down" and "widespread transmission" continues.

In Europe, the UK and Spain have the most confirmed cases, with 101 and 103 cases respectively.