Swine flu is now officially a pandemic, the World Health Organisation announced today

Swine flu has reached the status because there are now nearly 28,000 recorded cases of swine flu, which started to hit the headlines in April.  A disease is classified as a pandemic when there is extensive spreading from human to human in two different parts of the world, and is not in fact an indication of how contagious or dangerous the disease is.

Australia has confirmed they have 1,200 recorded cases – a four-fold increase in one week.  Hong Kong recently closed all nurseries and primary schools for 14 days after 12 children were discovered in school with the disease.

WHO chief Margaret Chan spoke to leaders of eight countries which have the disease in order to confirm the spread.  She has been reluctant to declare a formal pandemic to avoid the public anxiety it may cause, as the last global flu pandemic was over 40 years ago and killed about 1 million people worldwide.  The WHO is particularly keen to avoid reactionary panic measures such as border closures and travel bans and advocates moderate use of anti-viral drug tamiflu.

WHO spokesperson Gregory Hartl said they had been expecting the next flu pandemic to be a deadlier virus, like bird flu.  “It was believed that the next pandemic would be something like H5N1 bird flu, where you were seeing really high death rates, and so there were people who believed we might be in a kind of apocalyptic situation and what we’re really seeing now with H1N1 is that in most cases the disease is self-limiting.  Let’s say 98 or 99 per cent of the people we know so far to be affected recover without any need of hospitalisation.”

Most sufferers of swine flu experience normal flu symptoms and recover within a few days, there have been 141 confirmed deaths from the disease so far.