WHO to declare China Virus Outbreak Public Health Emergency

What criteria, what measures?

According to the WHO definition, a public health emergency of international concern corresponds to "an extraordinary event which has been determined to constitute a risk to public health in other States due to the risk of international spread of disease and that it may require coordinated international action ”. For an epidemic to cause USPPI, it must be " severe, sudden, unusual or unexpected ".

It is the Director-General of WHO who is responsible for determining whether an event meets these criteria, in this case, he must determine this Wednesday if the new Chinese virus falls within this framework. To make this decision, it relies on a committee of international experts specialized in the fight against diseases, virology, the development of vaccines or the epidemiology of infectious diseases.

A USPPI is accompanied by temporary recommendations which must be renewed (or not) every three months. They can concern people, luggage, cargo, containers, ships, airplanes, road vehicles, goods or postal parcels .

For example, this may include instructions for the care of the sick, the repatriation of contaminated foreign nationals or the transportation of medical equipment to infected countries. But it can also be instructions relating to the funeral of victims, the establishment of controls at airports, ports or at borders. In some cases, WHO may even recommend banning mass gatherings in infected countries, or consider that quarantine is necessary. It all depends on the risks.

What precedents?

In reality, the global health emergency is an exceptional measure, which has only been declared five times. The very first dates back to 2009, during the H1N1 flu pandemic , also called “swine flu”. This pandemic had caused, according to estimates , between 100,000 and 400,000 deaths . WHO announced the end of this pandemic on August 10, 2010. Since then, the virus has continued to circulate every winter. It is one of the regular seasonal flu viruses.

In 2014, the spread of polio in Central Asia, the Middle East and Central Africa also led to the declaration of a public health emergency of international concern . This highly contagious disease, caused by a virus that invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis in a few hours, mainly affects children under the age of five. Since then, two of the three strains of wild poliovirus, which caused the disease, have been eradicated, although the alert is still in progress.

Also in 2014, the outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa also led to a declaration by the USPPI. This epidemic, which lasted two years, is the largest and most complex since the discovery of the virus in 1976. In total, it affected nearly 30,000 people and killed more than 10,000, according to WHO , who believes that these figures are understated. The alert was lifted in 2016. But a new global health emergency was issued for Ebola in July 2019, after a new outbreak of the virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the second most serious in the history of this virus. To date, it has resulted in more than 2,230 fatalities. This alert is still in progress.

Finally, the Zika virus , transmitted by a mosquito and suspected of being linked to the Guillain-Barré neurological syndrome, also gave rise to a declaration of global health emergency in early 2016, WHO considering that it was also linked the exceptional increase, in South America, of births of babies suffering from microcephaly, a congenital disease preventing the brain from developing. A few months later, the health emergency was lifted, but the WHO specifies however that the Zika virus remains " a lasting and important public health problem . "

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