Current status

The Ministry of Health has defined the current Mexican Swine Influenza as Code Yellow.

Alert status

For planning purposes the different stages of the health response to an influenza pandemic have been grouped and defined with colour codes: Code White, Code Yellow, Code Red and Code Green.

Code White is information/advisory only, used in the planning stages of pandemic preparedness and for notification to the health sector of areas of concern overseas.

Code Yellow is a standby phase, used to alert the heath sector when there has been a significant development in the virus overseas, or single isolated cases in New Zealand.

Code Red is the response phase, used to alert the health sector that they should activate their response plans.

Code Green is to notify the health sector to standdown response and move into the recovery phase.

The World Health Organisation

The World Health Organisation has defined six distinct pandemic phases to help people prepare for a pandemic.

The present international situation is categorised as phase 6:

Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterised by community level outbreaks in at least one other country in a different WHO region in addition to the criteria defined in Phase 5 (see definition below). Designation of this phase will indicate that a global pandemic is under way.

(Phase 5 is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short.)

(Source: WHO website)

For more information about WHO's pandemic phases please click here.