With news reports about life getting back to normal in Mexico after an outbreak of H1N1 flu killed nearly 100 people and sickened about 1,200 others there, people might assume that the problem is going away.

Such an assumption could prove premature, according to World Health Organization (WHO flu expert Keiji Fukuda. He says it’s impossible to know whether the outbreak, which has so far affected more than 2,000 people worldwide, will turn into a pandemic or remain a mild-to-severe strain of influenza.

“We expect this kind of event to unfold over weeks and months. Pandemics don’t occur in a couple of days,” says Fukuda. “When we go back and we look at history, we’re often looking at a one-year period. Really if you look over a two-year period, that is really the period in which you see an increase in the number of illnesses and deaths during a pandemic influenza.”

Based on previous flu pandemics, which have affected up to one-third of the world’s population, Fukuda expects as many as two billion people could be infected with swine flu if the current outbreak goes pandemic.

Read the full story here: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D981HHTO3&show_article=1

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