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WHO fights claims H1N1 pandemic was hyped

flu.JPGAll Nature’s pandemic flu coverage is collected on our news special page.

The World Health Organization has again faced allegations that it has mishandled and overhyped the H1N1 outbreak.

Speakers at yesterday’s hearing of the Council of Europe’s Health Committee railed against the WHO’s declaration of a pandemic.

“The definition of a pandemic was changed by the WHO last May. It was only this change of definition which made it possible to transform a run-of-the-mill flu into a worldwide pandemic – and made it possible for the pharmaceutical industry to transform this opportunity into cash, under contracts which were mainly secret,” Wolfgang Wodarg, former chair of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s sub-committee on health, told the hearing.

Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology at the University of Munster, told the committee that “a number” of scientists were questioning the declaration of a pandemic.

“We are witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources in terms of public health,” he said. “Governments and public health services are wasting huge amounts of money in investing in pandemic diseases whose evidence base is weak.”

While swine flu has not become the deadly global pandemic that some feared it has still caused at least 14,142 deaths according to the most recent WHO data and the WHO has strongly defended itself.

It sent Keiji Fukuda, a WHO special advisor on pandemic influenza, to the hearing. “The labelling of the pandemic as ‘fake’ is to ignore recent history and science and to trivialize the deaths of over 14 000 people and the many additional serious illnesses experienced by others,” he said.

Earlier this year Nature warned in an editorial that, “The danger now is that last year’s relatively mild pandemic will create a false sense of security and complacency. The reality is that next time we might not be so lucky — especially given that this time most of the world’s population, living as they do in developing countries, had no access to either vaccines or antiviral drugs.”

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