Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, said Tuesday that this disparity is because the pandemic is spreading in a world where differences in health status, in access to care, in quality of that care, and in resources for health, are greater than at any time in recent history.
The Swine Flu pandemic will be a public health turning point around the globe because the consequences are likely to be so uneven and so unfairly felt depending on where you are.
Speaking to the WHO’s Regional Committee of the Americas, the director predicted that the overwhelming majority of cases will experience mild illness with spontaneous recovery.
However, she cautions that as the illness increases, this somewhat rosy picture will differ because of extremes in the clinical spectrum of disease, in public opinion, in access to vaccines, in ability to respond and in impact.
“The world will see proof of the validity of arguments public health has been making for decades,” she said and added that “Weak health systems cost lives. Equity matters in health in a life-and-death way.”
She calls H1N1 a “virus of extremes” that doesn’t “seem to have a middle ground.”
At one extreme are the mild cases, she said. At the other extreme is a small subset of patients who rapidly fall seriously ill, sometimes going from normal respiratory function to multi-organ failure within 24 hours
When exactly the same virus causes manageable disruption in wealthy countries, but devastation for health care elsewhere, we will see what inequity really means in a measurable way, the physician explained.
