WHO flu alerts to reflect severity as well as spread

Reuters, June 9, 2009

The World Health Organization kept its pandemic flu alert at the second highest level during a meeting last week, but said that future changes would reflect how severe an outbreak was as well as how widespread. The agency has been weighing how to revamp its pandemic alert scale to reflect both the severity of the flu as well as its geographic spread around the world following criticism that it may have caused undue panic about the new strain whose effects have been mainly mild apart from in Mexico.