source: Billions wasted on swine flu pandemic that never came: How did WHO get its prediction of a 7.5 million death toll so wrong?

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Seems important that this article is presented in a major news source in

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Billions wasted on swine flu pandemic that never came

How did the World Health Organisation get its prediction of a 7.5

million death toll so wrong?

By Rodgers and a Mundasad

Sunday, 16 May 2010

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/billions\

-wasted-on-swine-flu-pandemic-that-never-came-1974579.html

The spectre of plague stalked the world last year with its constant

companion, fear. Schools and stadiums were closed in Mexico, tourists

from Egypt to Singapore were quarantined, and the surgical mask became a

universal fashion accessory across Asia. Yet predictions that the global

death toll from swine flu could reach 7.5 million were well off the

mark. At most, the virus killed 14,000 people, and some of those had

pre-existing conditions or had been infected by other dangerous bugs as

well. Against a background death toll from seasonal flu of up to

500,000, the new H1N1 strain was invisible.

Professor Ulrich Keil, a World Health Organisation (WHO) adviser on

heart disease, said the decision to declare a pandemic had led to a

" gigantic misallocation " of health budgets. " We know the great killers

are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index,

physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake, " he told the

Council of Europe. Yet governments " instead wasted huge amounts of money

by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak " .

The suspicion that the response to the outbreak was an unnecessary panic

has been spreading since the virus slipped from the front pages. Even

the WHO, the UN body that first punched the big red button, may be

having doubts. An external committee has been set up to review its

reaction and will deliver an interim report this week, though at the

moment no bombshells are expected.

The WHO faces two main charges. The first is that between the first

cases of H1N1 being reported in March and the declaration of a full,

phase 6 pandemic by its director-general, Dr Margaret Chan, in June, the

organisation changed its definition of a pandemic. Critics say the old

definition required that a virus result in " enormous numbers of deaths

and illness " . The new definition applies only if the virus is new, if it

spreads easily between people, and if the population has little or no

immunity to it. A bug that causes a mild case of the sniffles could qualify.

A spokesman for the organisation insists there has been no change at all

-- that the old definition was an error on a single web page about bird

flu, the last great influenza scare. But Doshi, a doctoral

candidate at MIT whose thesis is on science, politics and influenza

policy, argued in a paper in the British Medical Journal in September

that the old definition had been widely applied by the WHO since at

least 2003.

The second charge, prominently made by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the former

head of health at the Council of Europe, is that the WHO is unduly

influenced by the drugs industry, which stood to make a fortune from

selling anti-virals and vaccines. The Swiss giant Novartis, for example,

saw its profits jump by nearly a third in the first quarter of this year

to $2.95bn, much of it from delivering swine flu vaccines ordered last

year. Debate rages over allegations that some experts who recommended

the pandemic be declared, have links to drugs companies, although this

has been denied. But critics note that it's hard to become an expert in

the field without having some funding from big pharmaceutical companies.

Others say that the problem is due to the spread of false assumptions.

Most people think, for example, that when they have flu symptoms they

must have influenza. But Dr Tom of the Cochrane Collaboration,

which reviews the evidence for various medical treatments, notes that

more than 200 agents can cause flu-like illnesses. Only 7.5 to 15 per

cent of cases are actually influenza. Anti-viral drugs and vaccines are

aimed just at this group. " To stop one new case of H1N1, you'd have to

inoculate 100 people, " says Dr . " or you could get four people to

wash their hands. " Masks work too, he says, and so does sending people

home from work if they have symptoms.

The usual justification for the massive response to H1N1 is that no one

wants a repeat of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 50

million people. But scientists are not even sure if that plague was

caused by influenza at all. The virus was not discovered until 1933. And

outbreaks since then have been much milder.

The last time H1N1 showed up was in 1976, at a US army base. Washington

ordered the immunisation of 40 million Americans before it discovered

that it had only one death from the flu but hundreds of cases of severe

side-effects to the vaccine. A review headed by Dr Harvey Fineberg put

much of the blame on the " influenza fraternity " , arguing that expert

panels tend towards " group think " and should be backed up by independent

scientific advice. Dr Fineberg is now chairman of the WHO's external

committee evaluating its response to the 2009 outbreak whose final

report next May could well lead to a radical rethink of the world's

reaction to new viruses.