GENEVA (AFP) — The World Health Organisation still expects the swine flu pandemic to subside in the northern hemisphere over the summer, despite its persistence in the likes of the United States and Britain.
Sylvie Briand, interim head of the WHO's influenza programme, said that cases of flu should still be expected but transmission would slow down thanks to the combined impact of the heat and school holidays.
"First of all there's a climactic aspect, knowing that flu viruses survive better in the cold than in the heat," Briand told AFP.
"The other important element is the density of contact between people. Children are on holiday and we don't have the outbreaks in schools like we had in the United States at the beginning of the epidemic," she added.
Even if the influenza A(H1N1) virus is new, "I think we will nonetheless have the same seasonal nature and transmission will decline in the northern hemisphere this summer, with a weak proportion of severe cases," Briand said.
England's Health Secretary Andy Burnham said Tuesday that 100,000 cases a day could occur across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales by the end of August if the current infection rate is maintained, stressing it was a projection.
In Washington, the White House said it would hold a high-level meeting next week bringing together top government officials to prepare for the possibility of a more severe outbreak of A(H1N1) influenza.
The meeting was called after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that at least one million people in the United States have had swine flu, basing the projection partly on computer models.
British authorities have indicated that officially reported infections may fall well short of the true number of cases.
At the WHO Briand suggested this was largely expected.
"Of course, because there are already a lot of cases where people have few symptoms where they just have a light cough and don't go to the doctor," she said.
"There are even asymptomatic cases of people who are carrying the virus and do not even know it."
Briand said the WHO was thinking of ending its global reporting of laboratory-confirmed cases of swine flu in each country, because it had become "almost unmanageable" to confirm all the cases.
"This data does account for a certain reality and especially the number of countries infected, which shows that most of the earth is now infected," said Briand.
However, "after a certain moment, counting is of little interest and represents just a considerable loss of time for countries," she explained.
The latest data released by the WHO Friday showed that 125 countries and territories have been infected since the new A(H1N1) influenza virus was uncovered in Mexico and the United States last April
Some 89,921 cases were confirmed by laboratory tests, including 382 deaths.
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