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Illness found in definition

By Jane Ferguson, Business Features Writer
Published: June 27, 2009, 22:43

The panic that swine flu has caused globally is described as a pandemic.

Indeed, since the world prepared for its impending doom, there have been 263 deaths from swine flu. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that each year around 250,000 to 500,000 deaths occur as a result of seasonal flu.

The divergence between these two figures is of concern to Professor James Chin, an epidemiologist at University of California, Berkeley. He believes the reaction of governments is not justified when considering the severity of the current outbreak.

“If they’re going to go through all of those procedures for this ‘pandemic’ what are they going to do for seasonal influenza?” said Chin.

Swine flu is more than ten times less severe than the seasonal flu, he said.

“It’s much less lethal and we’re stockpiling drugs, perhaps going to develop a vaccine, telling people to change their travel plans,” he said. “I think that one of the outcomes is that insufficient thought has been given to not factoring in severity.”

Were the current outbreak as devastating as the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, which is estimated to have killed tens of millions of people, then people would understand the world’s health officials’ reaction, he argued.

“If we had an influenza pandemic that severe or more severe, nobody would question what has happened,” said Chin.

Journalist and author Michael Fumento has pointed out how the WHO’s definition of a pandemic changed in 2003, widening it from a definition of a worldwide killer to one that encompasses worldwide cases of a disease, and not necessarily large numbers of deaths.

The WHO’s old definition of a pandemic encompassed a new strain of the virus appearing against which the human population has no immunity, resulting in several, simultaneous epidemics worldwide with enormous numbers of deaths and illness.

On the WHO’s website currently, they state: “Pandemics can be either mild or severe in the illness and death they cause, and the severity of a pandemic can change over the course of that pandemic.”

Changes in definition of specific diseases are also not new, with high blood pressure presenting a perfect case.

In 2005, Seattle Times reporter Duff Wilson wrote, “For years, doctors considered 120/80 to be ideal and anything under 140 to be OK. But a change took place in May 2003, when American doctors got new advice from a government-sanctioned medical panel called the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure.

In 2004 US patients and their insurance companies spent $16.3 billion for blood-pressure pills, up $3 billion from five years earlier, added Wilson.

Fumento believes that this serves the interests of pharmaceutical companies all too much.

“You are inventing more customers – suddenly people who were close to high blood pressure have high blood pressure.”

One of the reasons he offers for such changes in definitions is a fall in recent years of investment in the research and development side of the pharmaceuticals industry, resulting in fewer completely new medicines.

“It’s amazing how many drugs get approved each year that are actually new,” he said.

“It’s so much easier to get a disease that’s out there and broaden the definition than it is to develop a new drug for a new disease.”
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