GENEVA — The World Health Organization is sending a team of experts to Ukraine to look into reports of severe H1N1 disease there, a spokesperson for the global health agency said Friday.
Gregory Hartl said the team was being pulled together by the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, which goes by the acronym GOARN.
The team will travel early next week to the eastern European country, which has closed schools and banned public meetings in response to a spike in cases of acute respiratory illness believed to be H1N1.
"This is something that certainly needs investigating," Hartl told the Canadian Press from Geneva.
He said the government of Ukraine is being forthcoming with information on the outbreak, which is said to centre on three regions in the western part of the country.
The country, which is in the midst of an election campaign, has reportedly imposed strict measures to slow the spread of the virus.
According to the BBC, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said there would also be restrictions on what she called non-urgent travel between different parts of Ukraine. Reports on the number of deaths vary, some suggesting Tymoshenko had said only one person has died of the virus.
Tymoshenko’s political rival, President Victor Yuschenko, told reporters that 11 people have died of pandemic H1N1 infections. The Health Ministry, meanwhile, said it has confirmed only 1 death, according to a Reuters report. The National Radio Company of Ukraine (NRCU) reported that two labs have confirmed 11 pandemic H1N1 cases, but it didn’t mention the number of deaths.
Polskie Radio, based in Warsaw, reported on Oct. 30 that more than 2,000 people have been hospitalized and that 33 had died from an unknown virus in the Ukraine. The report said Polish health officials are monitoring the outbreak.
Though authorities in Poland have not ordered border closures, they are advising those traveling to the Ukraine about how to protect themselves from the flu.
The report identified the hardest hit areas as the Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv regions.
For at least the past week contributors to influenza news blogs and message boards have been translating Ukranian news sources to sift for clues about the Ukraine’s spike in respiratory diseases.
One translated report posted on the Flutrackers message board said some of the fatalities were young people who had severe hemorrhagic pneumonia. A regional health chief was quoted in one of the translated stories as saying autopsy revealed lungs soaked with blood.
CIDRAP News was unable to confirm if officials from the World Health Organization had sent a team to assess the flu outbreak in the Ukraine or if experts from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been asked to consult on the outbreak. No information was immediately available from the US Embassy in Kiev.
