Current event

Swine flu may spread to at least one- third of the world’s population within the next year and a full- fledged pandemic remains possible, the World Health Organization said.

In two weeks, the flu jumped from isolated reports in the U.S. and Mexico to a widening circle of infections in Central America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and New Zealand. The disease has been confirmed in 2,371 people in 24 countries, with 44 deaths, the WHO reported today.

A panel of the Geneva-based agency will meet May 14 to decide whether drugmakers should begin producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine against the new illness, a form of H1N1 influenza. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director- general of health, security and environment, said in a video broadcast from Geneva to Asian ministers in Bangkok today that more of the world’s 6 billion people will fall ill.

“Even if the illnesses appear relatively mild at the individual level, the global population level adds up to enormous numbers,” Fukuda said.

Fukuda declined to say how many deaths there might be in a full pandemic.

In the U.S., an outbreak in Illinois led to a jump in the number of confirmed cases to at least 896, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today on its Web site. The cases include two U.S. deaths and may represent a fraction of those infected, officials said.

Not ‘Petering Out’

Illinois cases totaled 204, the agency said. Most of the surge is attributable to the state’s new testing capability, Illinois officials said. Before this week, only the CDC lab in Atlanta could definitively identify U.S. cases of swine flu. Test kits were delivered May 5 to laboratories in all 50 states.

“As we look at the data so far, we’re not seeing any sign that this is petering out,” Richard Besser, the acting director of the CDC, said today on a conference call. “We’re still in the upswing of what we call the epidemic curve. We see ongoing transmission and we expect that to continue.”

Hong Kong, which confirmed its first case of swine flu on May 1, and China are today releasing some people who were isolated after they were found to be on the same flight as an infected patient.

A 58-year-old Polish woman, that country’s first confirmed swine flu case, is recovering and the passengers on her May 2 flight from New York to Warsaw are being monitored for symptoms, Pawel Wierdak, a spokesman for the Polish mission to the United Nations in New York, said yesterday in an interview.