WHO: The global swine flu epidemic is still in its early stages

PanARMENIAN.Net - Keiji Fukuda, WHO's Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment, said at WHO Geneva meeting that given the size of the world's population, the new H1N1 virus is likely to spread for some time.



WHO earlier estimated that as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years.



"Even if we have hundreds of thousands of cases or a few millions of cases ... we're relatively early in the pandemic," Fukuda said in an interview at WHO's headquarters in Geneva.



The global health agency stopped asking governments to report new cases last week, saying the effort was too great now that the disease has become so widespread in some countries.