UNITED NATIONS LOSES COUNT

摘要

During The First, feverish months of the swine-flu outbreak, the World Health Organization (the public health arm of the United Nations) broke down the numbers of new cases by country to show where the virus was spreading. Then, in July, the WHO quietly announced that it was abandoning its count. While this may seem baffling, counting cases has long been counterproductive. The problem with an exploding epidemic-Britain's chief medical officer recorded 100,000 new cases of swine flu in just one week in July-is that the effort required to count it grows just as fast. "You can't devote exponentially growing resources to just surveillance," says Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard professor of epidemiology. So what can authorities do? Track trends-specifically, how the virus is mutating.