by Robert Elia

Created on: November 04, 2009

Is the swine flu really considered a pandemic?

Well what is the definition of a pandemic? A pandemic is when a disease such as " swine flu (h1n1) " is spread to several continents of the world at the same time. swine flu " h1n1 " at the moment has infected a total of 73 countries and 25000 infected according to "WHO". So i would consider this a pandemic, but that doesn't mean it is anymore dangerous. Being called pandemic just means it has spread across enough of the world to be recognized. For example the regular seasonal flu technically is a pandemic because of the number of countries infected and total of people who die are infected by this a year. So just because the swine flu has been called a pandemic doesn't necessarily mean that the flu outbreak will do any harm. So you shouldn't panic over the swine flu just yet,scientist don't know if this disease will get worse or if it will just die out. They believe that the swine flu has not reached its peak yet and expect that during this up coming winter they will learn more about this swine flu pandemic. So when you here people freaking out about it being a pandemic tell them that the regular seasonal flu is more contagious than the swine flu so at the moment there is nothing to worry about until the swine flu get really deadly or starts fighting antibodies. On the other hand other people may argue saying how can the swine flu be a pandemic when the regular seasonal flu isn't one yet the seasonal flu infects and kills more people in a single year than the swine flu does. So at the moment the swine flu is still undetermined on how strong it is, how long you have it before viruses is visible, and how contagious the swine flu is.

Who's definition of pandemic

http://www.fumento.com/disease/who.html

So how can the WHO say swine flu qualifies as a pandemic? And why?

The WHO definition for "influenza pandemic" once required "several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness." But in 2005, it promulgated a definition that virtually ignores the number of cases and completely ignores deaths. Now it requires "sustained chains of human-to-human transmission leading to community-wide outbreaks" in two parts of the world, with this addition: The cause must be an animal or human-animal flu virus; the latter is known as genetic reassortment.

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