The World Health Organization said Thursday that up to 2 billion people could be infected by swine flu if the current outbreak turns into a pandemic. The agency said a pandemic typically lasts two years.
WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda said the number wasn’t a prediction, but that experience with flu pandemics showed one-third of the world’s population gets infected.
“If we do move into a pandemic then our expectation is that we will see a large number of people infected worldwide,” Fukuda said. “If you look at past pandemics, it would be a reasonable estimate to say perhaps a third of the world’s population would get infected with this virus.”
In Mexico, which has had the most cases, high schools and universities opened for the first time in two weeks as the country’s top health official insisted the epidemic is on the decline. All students were checked for swine flu symptoms and some were sent home.
Fukuda said WHO is unable to know what the future holds and that it is impossible now to say whether the outbreak will turn into a pandemic or whether it would be a mild or severe strain of influenza.
Even with a mild flu, “from the global perspective there are still very large numbers of people who could develop pneumonia, require respirators, who could die,” Fukuda said.
People react differently to the flu depending on their general state of health and other factors.
Some younger people in the Southern Hemisphere may be more vulnerable because of malnourishment, war, HIV infections and other factors, Fukuda said. This means a mild outbreak in wealthier countries can be “quite severe in its impact in the developing world,” he said.
“We expect this kind of event to unfold over weeks and months. Pandemics don’t occur in a couple of days. When we go back and we look at history, we’re often looking at a one-year period. Really if you look over a two-period that is really the period in which you see an increase in the number of illnesses and deaths during a pandemic influenza.”
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