Ethiopian Review

The World Health Organisation may cut short its annual assembly this month because health ministers are needed at home to combat the H1N1 flu virus spreading around the globe, a spokesman said on Friday.

Diplomats said consensus was building among the WHO’s 193 member states to reduce the policy-setting assembly, set for May 18 to 27 in Geneva, to five days because of the pandemic threat.

“It is definitely under consideration, it is a possibility,” WHO spokesman Thomas Abraham told Reuters.

“People need to be in their home countries. At the same time, it is an important gathering,” he said.

Mexico’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva said he would raise concerns at the meeting about what he said were “discriminatory” measures imposed against it, its people, and its exports because of the flu.

It emerged earlier this week that dozens of Mexicans had been placed in forced quarantine in China as a protective measure against the spread of the virus. Mexico called the Chinese action discriminatory, but the Beijing government said it was purely medical.

The ambassador did not single out China but denounced moves to quarantine or mistreat Mexicans because of their nationality.

According to the latest WHO tally, 2,371 people in 24 countries have been infected with the recently identified strain that scientists say is a mixture of swine, human and bird viruses.

Young adults have been most heavily infected by the new virus, which has killed 42 people, all but two in Mexico, according to the WHO.

Under the U.N. agency’s rules, a committee would need to decide to shorten the World Health Assembly on the first day, according to diplomats.

Mexican ambassador Luis Alfonso De Alba said his country’s health minister would attend the assembly, whose agenda is expected to be dominated by the H1N1 outbreak and the response to it.

“Issues which are not urgent will not have to be dealt (with) now,” he told a news briefing.

Mexico is considered the epicentre of the H1N1 outbreak, and has 1,112 laboratory-confirmed cases to date, according to the WHO. The United States has had 896 infections, including two deaths, while Canada has 201 cases and no fatalities.

Earlier on Friday, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan urged Asian health ministers to “refrain from introducing economically and socially destructive measures that lack solid scientific backing and bring no clear benefit”.

“The rational use of travel- and trade-related measures is always wise at a time of severe economic downturn,” she told them in a telephone conference.

The spread of H1N1 flu in Mexico, the United States and Canada caused Chan to raise the global pandemic alert level last week to 5 out of 6, signalling a pandemic is “imminent.”

Spain and Britain are the two countries in Europe with the highest numbers of confirmed cases, with 81 and 32 respectively. Germany has 10 cases and Italy and France have five each.

The disease has also caused six infections in Israel, five in New Zealand and three in South Korea, according to the WHO.

Other countries with smaller numbers of confirmed infections are Portugal, Poland, Ireland, Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, El Salvador, China (Hong Kong), Guatemala, Colombia, and Costa Rica.

- Reuters