World Health Organisation Director-General Margaret Chan is holding an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss the severity of H1N1 flu outbreaks, but no decision is expected on moving to the top level of pandemic alert, a WHO spokeswoman said, according to Reuters. "The agenda is not to decide on phase 6, I would like to stress this," WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told a news briefing in Geneva. The teleconference is set to begin at 1200 GMT and last about an hour, she added. "There is no timetable for WHO to go into phase 6, as you know we need to see community transmission in another WHO region and secondly to assess the severity," she said. The experts will discuss new findings about the virus as well as international public health measures, Chaib said. The new strain, commonly known as swine flu, has infected 21,940 people in 69 countries, killing 125 of them, according to the United Nations agency's latest tally. Mexico, the United States and Canada have borne the brunt of the illness. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's acting assistant director-general, said earlier this week that the spread of H1N1 flu in Spain, Britain, Japan, Australia and Chile had nudged the world closer to a pandemic. For now, WHO's pandemic scale remains at the second-highest level, phase 5 on a scale of 1 to 6.
