By IANS,
New Delhi: A few hours after a senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official Tuesday admitted that swine flu scare was exaggerated, the UN agency issued a statement, defending its action and asserting that such accusations would “trivialise” the deaths of thousands of people.
On the sidelines of an event here, the WHO regional director for southeast Asia, Samlee Plianbangchang said — in reply to a question whether H1N1 scare was exaggerated by the global health watchdog — “Yes, it was”.
But, WHO officals immediately became tight-lipped after that short answer.
Late Tuesday evening, the WHO director issued a statement defending the actions and advice given by the UN agency during the pandemic scare.
“Any suggestion that the pandemic is an ‘exaggeration’ is to ignore recent history and science, and to trivialise the deaths of over 17,000 people and the many additional serious illnesses experienced by others,” he said.
He also said that world is still going through a “real pandemic”. “This current influenza pandemic is a scientifically well-documented event, in which the emergence and spread of a new influenza virus has caused unusual patterns of disease throughout the world,” said Plianbangchang, a Thai national.
The UN health watchdog declared Influenza A (H1N1) as a pandemic in 2009 after the disease broke out across the globe.
India has already expressed its displeasure and demanded an investigation into “unnecessary scare” created by the WHO.
Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Dinesh Trivedi has said it was important to find out whether there was ever a nexus between pharmaceutical companies and the WHO, which made the global health watchdog declare H1N1 flu a pandemic virus.
“We definitely demand an inquiry. WHO is not god,” Trivedi told reporters.
The global health watchdog had said that the pandemic would affect at least one-third of the global population and this created a lot of panic around the globe. However, the impact was much less than expected.
India, a country of over 120 crore, saw a little over 30,000 infections since May 2009 till date. Of these, 1,465 people have died till April 5, 2010. But going by the WHO forecasts, over 33 crore people were expected to be afflicted by the virus.
While several companies across the world are busy making the vaccine, India has already imported 1.5 million doses from the multinational firm Sanofi Pasteur. An Indian vaccine is yet to reach market.