Swine flu: drug panic

One of the World Health Organisation's (WHO) own senior experts has controversially claimed that the recent H1N1 swine flu pandemic was little more than an "angst campaign" which has led to a "gigantic misallocation" of health budgets worldwide.

German Professor Ulrich Keil, who is director of the WHO's centre for epidemiology at the University of Muenster, and a senior adviser to the organisation for over 35 years, also said in an interview with the Sunday Tribune that "there is no H1N1 pandemic".

Instead, he noted that the WHO had belatedly admitted that it changed its previous definition of a pandemic in order to subsequently declare a "so-called" swine flu pandemic.

This has in turn prompted accusations that drug companies unduly influenced public health officials to spend billions of euro of taxpayers' money building up unnecessary stockpiles of H1N1 vaccine.

In a statement late last month to a hearing of the influential Strasbourg-based Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which is examining whether the swine flu threat was exaggerated, Prof Keil noted that previous pandemic predictions had also not come true.

Yet despite" contradictory data" from Mexico and "weak and unconvincing evidence", the WHO's director general Dr Margaret Chan declared the H1N1 pandemic in June 2009, he said.

"In recent years we have been witnessing angst campaigns with regard to Sars in 2002-3, with regard to avian flu in 2005-6 and now we live with the so-called swine flu pandemic," he said.

"We are presently witnessing a gigantic misallocation of resources in public health."

Speaking to the Sunday Tribune last week, Keil added that it was a "shame that a minor disease gets so much attention worldwide, but the major epidemics, which really kill people by the millions, are taken for granted and do not get enough attention."

He added:?"Already four months ago it was clear what we know now with even more confidence: there is no H1N1 pandemic."

However, both the WHO and the Irish College of General Practitioners have rejected Keil's claims, arguing that it is difficult to know what would have happened had health authorities not acted swiftly to combat the disease.

Dr Eamonn Shanahan of the ICGP said that the decision to declare a pandemic was made at a time when the UK was seeing hundreds of thousands of new cases of the flu per week.

"This is not a trivial illness... it had all the hallmarks of a pandemic. Yes, the WHO may have overreacted. But I do understand why they did what they did."