At least 7,826 people worldwide have been killed by the A/H1N1 influenza since the new flu virus was first identified in April, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a latest update on Friday.
Of all the deaths, 5,360 occurred in the Americas, 738 occurred in South-East Asia and at least 650 occurred in Europe. The other three WHO regions, West Pacific, East Mediterranean and Africa reported 644, 330 and 104 deaths respectively.
The WHO, which declared the A/H1N1 flu as a pandemic in June, said so far more than 207 countries and overseas territories or communities have reported laboratory confirmed cases, the number of which totals over 622,482. But this case count should be significantly lower than the actual number of cases that have occurred because many countries have stopped
testing and reporting individual cases.
Currently pandemic activities remain high in most northern hemisphere countries, and low in the southern hemisphere, the WHO said.
There are signs that disease activities have peaked in the United States and a limited number of European countries, but " overall right now it is still to early to say whether we are seeing peaking of activity in the northern hemisphere," according to Dr Keiji Fukuda, the WHO's top flu expert.
"We need to expect continued activity for at least some number of weeks in the northern hemisphere before we see a definitive down or turn," Fukuda told reporters on Thursday.