The swine flu virus has reached 160 countries and could infect two billion people within the next two years, the World Health Organization has said. A senior WHO official, Keiji Fukuda, said the virus was still in its early stages and would continue to spread for some time. Mr Fukuda said work on a vaccine was intensifying but safety could not be compromised by rushing the process. The virus is thought to have killed almost 800 people in recent months. Mr Fukuda, the WHO’s Assistant Director General for Health Security, said the agency had been reporting only laboratory-confirmed cases, but that this was always going to be ‘only a subset of the total number of cases’. ‘Even if we have hundreds of thousands of cases or a few millions of cases, we’re relatively early in the pandemic,’ he told the Associated Press news agency. ‘One of the things that is relatively clear is that we will continue to see spread of the virus; even though we are now three to four months into the pandemic, this is still pretty early into the overall period,’ he said. Mr Fukuda said the WHO estimates two […]