Opinions divided on swine flu fear

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDApr 15 2010

According to health experts the swine flu pandemic is far from over and remains a threat to the population, especially the young. John Mackenzie, the Australian who heads the World Health Organization’s independent but secretive Emergency Committee said in a statement on Wednesday, “This is just as severe as we saw in 1957 and 1968, with one major difference. We are not seeing deaths in the elderly but we are seeing them in a more important group of the population, healthy young adults… It is much more severe than people tend to talk about.”

At present there have been 17,700 officially reported deaths due to the H1N1 flu but WHO says the true horrors of these numbers is yet to come in another year or two. Mackenzie also said that in another two or three weeks the committee will convene to advise WHO Director-General Margaret Chan on whether the world has moved to a post-peak phase. He indicated that such a decision remained premature. He warned that, “We still have evidence of the pandemic in Asia and in West Africa… We also want to see what happens in a second wave in the southern hemisphere. We have no idea what will happen and have some concerns.” The committee will produce an interim report in time for next month's WHO World Health Assembly, and aims to conclude it by next January's WHO Executive Board meeting.

Last June the Emergency Committee was the key agent behind the declaration of the pandemic by the UN agency over the six phases. At phase six the advance purchase agreements of vaccines were triggered in most some Western countries. There have been a lot of criticisms that the needless panic that resulted in stockpiling vaccines that were unused was a waste of taxpayer’s funds with a general discontent among the public over the issue.

Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine in Washington, said the 29 member panel will sort out conflicts of interests in the issue. He said, “We're not here either to defend or to prosecute the WHO, that's not our job. We're here to find out as best we can, in as truthful way we can what are the lessons that can be learnt.” He added, “We are actually still in the process of identifying all the possible sources of bias…This is a committee that is composed of a lot of individuals who have done a lot of things in public health.”

GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi-Aventis are the two leading pharmaceutical companies who have come up with the H1N1 vaccines. David Salisbury, head of the WHO's vaccine advisory body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), said that a single dose of vaccine would be sufficient to provide immunity for adults, and not two as generally expected. He added that the panel members were vetted and there had been no declaration of conflicts in proceedings on H1N1 vaccine. He also said that pharmaceutical firms were invited to take part in a consultation on vaccine production capacity, "To my knowledge the industry has not done anything other than provide us with scientific information… There was at no time any attempt to influence the advice we gave, either in the timing or the content of the advice we gave.”