Taipei Times warns: WHO on alert over swine flu outbreak
Is this the big one?
The WHO was on high alert yesterday in the face of an outbreak of swine flu with alarming characteristics that has killed as many as 60 people in Mexico and also reached the US.
“The most worrying fact is that it appears to transmit from human to human,” a spokesman for the UN body, Thomas Abraham, said, adding that the swine flu virus had mutated into “a mix of genes that we have never seen before.”
Dave Daigle of the US Centers for Disease Control, which is working closely with the WHO, said a strain of bird flu, two of swine flu and one human strain had combined for the first time.
These features, along with the fact that unusually young and healthy adults have fallen victim — rather than the very old or very young — have given rise to fears of a serious epidemic, if not a pandemic.
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