Health authorities around the world need to be vigilant as swine flu— the influenza A(H1N1) virus — meets seasonal flu viruses flowing through the yet unaffected Southern Hemisphere, head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.
“The current winter season gives influenza viruses an opportunity to inter-mingle and possibly exchange their genetic material in unpredictable ways,” WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in her closing remarks to the World Health Assembly on Friday.
According to WHO, as of yesterday, some 42 countries had reported 11,168 laboratory confirmed cases of the infection, including 86 deaths. However, Chan noted that the pandemic alert level remains at Phase 5 – on a six-point warning scale – meaning that sustained human-to-human transmission of the virus on a community level is mostly restricted to a single geographic region, in this case North America.
