Global Health Progress

Abuja — The Federal Government yesterday declared that the swine flu epidemic currently ravaging Mexico and some parts of Europe has not been reported in any part of the country. Minister of Health, Professor Babatunde Osotimehin, who made this known, confirmed that no case of the Influenza had so far been reported in Nigeria. The Minister who addressed reporters at the end of the weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting in Abuja, however, urged those just back from trips abroad having chest pain, muscle pain and headache to quickly visit the nearest hospital where they would be isolated and treated in order to avoid the spread.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has released a new version of its Flu Trends service that is tailored for Mexico in the hope of helping health officials and others track the spread of swine flu in that country. Google Flu Trends, which was first released in the United States, in November, tries to track the incidence of flu based on the ebb and flow of searches for keywords related to influenza. The company called its Flu Trends for Mexico experimental because unlike in the United States, it does not have historical surveillance data to validate that its search data correlates to actual infections.

DOOMSDAY visions of curfews, sealed borders, travel bans and scuffles over food are a long way from materialising in the current crisis. But if the World Health Organization declares a pandemic, countries could bring in draconian measures to isolate and treat infection, prevent further spread and keep societies functioning. On Monday 27 April, the global threat level rose to 4 on a 6-point scale (see diagram), escalating the WHO strategy to prevent further spread of the virus beyond Mexico, where the epidemic originated. It remained on 4 as New Scientist went to press.

GENEVA (Reuters) – Experience of fighting bird flu and SARS in her native Hong Kong has steeled World Health Organization chief Margaret Chan for the ultimate challenge of tackling a potential global flu pandemic. When bird flu first jumped to humans in 1997, Chan — then serving as Hong Kong’s health director — issued orders within days to slaughter the entire poultry population of 1.5 million birds.

The 2009 Regional Ministerial Meeting on Promoting Health Literacy” Is part of the preparatory process for the 2009 Annual Ministerial Review (AMR).

THE Government is still studying the outbreak of swine flu in North America before coming up with measures to stop the spread of the virus to Uganda, officials of the health ministry and WHO said yesterday. “We have never experienced the disease here,” said Nicholas Kauta, the commissioner for livestock health and entomology. “So we have to go back to our books to find out all the risk factors before we can come up with an official position or control measures.” He noted that diagnosing and treating foreign diseases was difficult since there was no local experience available.

A new section of the Kaiser Family Foundation main Web site has launched to focus on U.S. global health policy. It provides U.S. policymakers, non-governmental organizations, journalists and others working in the global health arena with timely information, including daily news summaries, a policy tracker tool, and original research and analysis.

President Obama on Monday named Eric Goosby as the new global AIDS coordinator and administrator of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the New York Times reports (Macfarquhar, New York Times, 4/27). Goosby, whose nomination has to be confirmed by the Senate, currently serves as CEO and chief medical officer of Pangaea Global AIDS Foundation and as a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California-San Francisco (CQ HealthBeat, 4/27).

U.S. health officials expressed concern Friday that a swine flu virus that has infected eight people in the United States matches samples of a virus that has killed at least 68 people in Mexico.
Read the full article on the CNN site >>

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their site today to reflect the number of human cases of swine flu reported in the U.S. as of 1pm April 27, 2009.
Read more about swine flu on the CDC site >>