When a disease becomes ‘endemic’, it may still cause suffering and death: WHO

Throwing light on what the term entails, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently clarified that when a disease becomes “endemic,” it may still cause suffering and death, referring to the dreaded coronavirus.

Speaking to reporters, Dr Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme, said “I think we need to be careful here in terms of the word ‘endemic’.”
He clarified and said,”Yes, endemic means, in a sense, that the virus is present and transmitting at lower levels, usually with some form of seasonal transmission or increases that are seasonal or outbreaks on top of an endemic situation.”

When a disease becomes “endemic,” it may still cause suffering and death — as malaria and tuberculosis do, for example. @DrMikeRyan explains that even if #COVID19 becomes endemic, it will remain important to reduce infections, suffering and death. pic.twitter.com/ds5FFRhvO0
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 12, 2022
The public health special explained that while the lower levels of transmission are “very classic for many infectious diseases”, “endemic HIV, endemic tuberculosis and endemic malaria kill millions of people on this planet every year.”
Emphasising on the fact, the expert issued a reminder again, “Please don’t equate endemic with equals good.”
“Endemic diseases require strong control programmes to reduce infections, to reduce suffering, to reduce death. Just changing from pandemic to endemic is just changing the label. That doesn’t change the challenge that we face”, the expert noted.

Issuing notes for the future, in terms of how the Covid-19 virus transmission needs to be controlled, Dr Ryan said, “We need sustained control on this virus and we need sustained protection of our most vulnerable,” referring to marginalised communities across the world.
He went on to continue, “We need strong health systems to deal with those infections we can’t prevent, and we need to be able to continue to do that with the levels of infection we experience.”

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