Jonathan Gornall is a freelance investigative journalist who specialises in medical and child-protection issues.

In an interesting article Pandemic or panic? he considers the media reporting and considers that

'It doesn't help that official-speak is often stripped of cautionary meaning as it passes through the media headline filter.

On Monday, when the WHO raised its threat level to phase 4, most media organisations reported only that it had been raised to the "third highest level", without explaining what the levels meant.

In fact, phases 1 to 3 are "predominantly animal infections; few human infections".

Phase 4 is characterised as "sustained human-to-human transmission".

Wednesday's announcement by Dr Margaret Chan, WHO's director general, that the alert had now reached phase 5, "widespread human infection", required only "human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region".

However his most critical observation for myself reflects the considerably more callous comment by the boss of Ryanair, Michael O'Leary, that 'It is a tragedy only for people living. . . in slums in Asia or Mexico'

He quotes instead Yuen Kwok-yung, a microbiology professor at the University of Hong Kong, who told Reuters that the situation in Mexico might be attributable to "deficiencies" in the country's healthcare system "and widespread antibiotic resistance that is typical of developing countries, resulting in victims dying of secondary infections.

Dr Chan, WHO director general, said it was possible that the "full clinical spectrum of this disease goes from mild illness to severe disease", but there was a danger that swine flu could prove to be a burden chiefly on the poor – and that introduced a moral obligation on the rest of the world community.

"From past experience," she said, "we also know that influenza may cause mild disease in affluent countries, but more severe disease, with higher mortality, in developing countries


"Above all, this is an opportunity for global solidarity as we look for responses and solutions that benefit all countries, all of humanity. After all, it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic."