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WHO cares for pigs, uses technical name for flu
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-02 15:07 GENEVA: The World Health Organization announced on Thursday it would stop using the term "swine flu" to avoid confusion over the danger posed by pigs.
WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said the agriculture industry and the UN food agency had expressed concerns that the term "swine flu" was misleading consumers and needlessly causing countries to ban pork products and order the slaughter of pigs. "Rather than calling this swine flu ... we're going to stick with the technical scientific name H1N1 influenza A," Thompson said. WHO cares for pigs, uses technical name for flu The swine flu virus originated in pigs, and has genes from human, bird and pig viruses. Scientists don't know exactly how it jumped to humans. In the current outbreak, WHO says the virus is being spread from human-to-human, not from contact with infected pigs. Egypt began slaughtering its roughly 300,000 pigs on Wednesday even though experts said swine flu is not linked to pigs and not spread by eating pork. Angry farmers protested the government decree. In Paris, the World Organization for Animal Health said on Thursday "there is no evidence of infection in pigs, nor of humans acquiring infection directly from pigs". Killing pigs "will not help guard against public or animal health risks" presented by the virus and "is inappropriate," the group said in a statement. Most in the Muslim world do not eat pork because of religious restrictions. The farmers in Egypt raise the pigs for consumption by the country's Christian minority. WHO has started distributing its stockpile of 2 million treatments of the antiviral drug Tamiflu to regional offices, which will decide where to send them next. Many of those drugs will go to developing countries that don't have stockpiles of their own and some will be sent to Mexico, Fukuda said, without providing figures. AP |
