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The World Health Organization has declared its intention to conduct a reappraisal of the way it decides when swine flu will be a pandemic. Governments across the world have been in touch with the WHO at its headquarters in Geneva in this matter. The WHO’s pandemic warning scale, with levels from 1 through 6, measures the way in which the disease spreads and does not take into account the severity of the disease in the areas it enters. Today’s pandemic scale with swine flu, is at Phase 5, a step short of a full pandemic declaration. Health officials from countries across the world meeting in Geneva, have asked the WHO to bring in more to the pandemic scale than just measures of how far and wideswine flu spreads. The WHO has agreed to consider the suggestion.

The swine flu keeps spreading today; but most people who fall ill with the disease do not report severe illness. The WHO feels that the mild attacks that this flu brings on would send people into a panic if there was a pandemic tag attached to it. There doesn’t seem to be a need to declare a pandemic when governments across the world seem to be prepaing very well for it anyway; it does not seem as if declaring a pandemic could serve a particular purpose, according to WHO. Still, the WHO believes in considering overhauling its pandemic warning philosophy. It feels that there is no point in rigidly keeping to some outdated philosophy. If matters become much worse than they are now in both the reach of the flu and severity, the WHO believes that a pandemic declaration would be in order.

The CDC believes now that 100,000 people in the US might be infected with swine virus. Of those, only 5% are verified cases. Even so, the government believes that swine flu in the US has reached its peak and is now beginning to fall. This announcement is only meant to help people take heart and regain hope; people still do need to exercise reasonable caution covering themselves as they cough or sneeze, and washing their hands often.

Nobody believes that there is any reason yet to relax. The government is now allocating $1 billion to put behind the swine flu vaccine program to bankroll clinical studies that need to be done before a vaccine can be placed on the market.

The WHO is a scientifically run organization whose every choice of word and decision will affect the lives and health of millions of people around the world. This then is a look at the way the WHO conducts itself for every decision it can make.