Epidemic And Pandemic: The Difference According To The WHO

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

The announcement by the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare the outbreak of COVID-19 (cornovirus) a pandemic that plagues 114 nations has raised doubts about the difference between epidemic and pandemic.

In 2010, the WHO defined a pandemic as "the worldwide spread of a new disease" and adds on its website that the viruses that cause pandemics generally come from the same viruses that affect animals.

On the other hand, the epidemic is defined by this international organization as an outbreak of a disease that spreads rapidly in a certain region and with a high case fatality rate.

Likewise, the institution explains that natural or man-made disasters are factors that aggravate the conditions for its development, such as cholera, which has spread in different African countries such as the Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia and, in the case of Latin America, Haiti.

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Georgetown University professor of global health law Lawrence O. Gostin explained that “typically, an outbreak becomes an epidemic when it becomes quite widespread in one country, sometimes in a particular region, as [happened to] the Zika, "he told The New York Times. "While a pandemic is viewed as a wide geographic distribution of a disease in many parts of the world, on several continents."

According to the WHO, as of Wednesday, 118,000 cases of infection have been reported in 114 countries, of which 4,291 so far have ended with the death of the patient. The organization's director, Tedros Adhanom, said he is "deeply concerned" and called on governments to take urgent measures to combat the outbreak.