Swine flu pandemic handling fell short of expectations, WHO admits

WHO bungled swine flu pandemic

Swine flu or the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 could have been handled better by health officials, a preliminary report by the World Health Organization said today. The United Nations health agency had formed a committee to look into how effective it was in handling the pandemic.

The panel concluded that WHO committed some mistakes that could prove too costly in the event of another swine flu outbreak in the future.

Among the flaws identified by the panel was how the agency defined what exactly is a pandemic in complex terms that many people could not understand. It described the pandemic phases according to the agency as "needlessly complex" and discovered that some experts advising the agency during the swine flu crisis had conflicts of interest since they were linked to pharmaceutical firms.

Under the mechanisms put in place by WHO back then, the committee concluded that it will not be ready to address a pandemic like H1N1 in the future.

"The world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public health emergency," the report authors said.

They warned further that tens of millions of lives could be lost in a full-blown pandemic even with improved practices by WHO and governments around the world.

H1N1 was not severe and widespread enough as originally thought to cause a true pandemic and many of those infected did not need medication to recover. The report comes after criticisms from some groups that WHO officials were in cahoots with drug companies who made vaccines for swine flu.

Posted by George Daniels on Monday March 14 2011, 6:07 AM EST. Ref: AP. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Featured News, Health. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0