Abstrakt: |
As this article goes to print in the first week of May, we are ending the second full week of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak. It appears the World Health Organization (WHO) may raise its Pandemic Alert level to Phase 6, indicating a full-scale pandemic with sustained human-tohuman infection. Despite this, there are signs that this outbreak will turn out to be relatively mild and may even fade altogether. Why, then, the high level of concern from both WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)? What is the significance of this outbreak? Are there any further actions we as individual clinicians should take? These questions and others will be examined in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |