Coming hard on the heels of the World Health Organization´s (WHO) declaration on Saturday that the deadly swine flu outbreak was a public health emergency of "pandemic potential," the two ministries have called a meeting of the Technical Subcommittee on Avian Influenza at the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives Monday.
"We are alert now and convening a meeting of the technical subcommittee on Monday, where we will discuss the safety measures that can be taken," Director of the Epidemology and Disease Control Division at the Health Ministry Dr Shailendra Uprety said. They will discuss quarantine measures to be taken at the international airport and the surveillance of swine throughout the country.
Director General of WHO Margaret Chan had said Saturday that the North American outbreak of the never-before-seen virus was a very serious situation with "pandemic potential" and had convened an emergency meeting of expert advisers for the first time since the committee of advisers was created two years ago to handle the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic.
After the second day of the meeting, WHO urged governments to step up their surveillance of suspicious outbreaks but left further decisions up to individual nations.
Swine flu, which claimed its first victim in Mexico City on April 13, has spread to other parts of the world through people visiting Mexico. New Zealand said that 10 students who took a school trip to Mexico "likely" had swine flu. Israel said a man who had recently visited Mexico had been hospitalized, and authorities are trying to determine whether he had the swine flu. France said that two people who had returned from Mexico with fevers were being monitored in regions near the port cities of Bordeaux and Marseilles.
Some of those who died in Mexico are confirmed to have a unique version of the A/H1N1 flu virus, which is a combination of bird, pig and human viruses, according to the WHO. Symptoms include a fever of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius), body aches, coughing, sore throat, respiratory congestion and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.
The Spanish flu that killed about 40 million people and infected almost half of the world´s population of two billion in 1918 was also caused by the H1N1 virus.
The new flu strain, which apparently transmits from human to human, poses the biggest risk of a large-scale pandemic since avian flu surfaced in 1997, killing several hundred people. A 1968 "Hong Kong" flu pandemic killed about one million people globally.
No vaccine specifically protects against swine flu, and it is unclear how much protection current human flu vaccines might offer.
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