The WHO emergency committee, composed of 15 external advisers, said it remained critical for countries to maintain vigilance concerning the pandemic, including necessary public health measures for disease control and surveillance, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said in a statement.
"We're still in the pandemic," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told Reuters.
Chan said that pandemic flu activity was expected to continue, and the committee would meet again by mid-July to review the status of the outbreak once more data from the winter influenza season in the southern hemisphere was available.
Chan's decision, based on the committee's recommendation, means that the outbreak, widely known as swine flu, remains at phase 6 on the WHO's pandemic scale, which has been at the top level of 6 since June 2009.
"It is predicted that H1N1 will continue to be the primary or overwhelming virus among influenza viruses for quite a while," Hartl said on Tuesday. "Pandemic or no pandemic, H1N1 will still exist. If there is no pandemic, it means that H1N1 is behaving like a normal flu virus."
Laboratory tests have confirmed more than 18,000 deaths from H1N1 infection, according to WHO figures, but the actual global death toll is much higher and will take at least a year after the pandemic ends to establish.
Read the
full statement from the World Health Organization.
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