WHO did the right thing

The business paper Les Echos agrees with the World Health Organisation's decision to declare the swine flu a pandemic: "Since less than 150 people in the world have fallen victim to the illness people are quite rightly asking whether the WHO hasn't gone too far … [But] the Geneva institution has taken the right action. It has stuck to the criteria which define a pandemic, in particular the presence of several independent trouble spots on different continents. The H1N1 swine flu is without doubt a pandemic, and by expressing a scientific reality the WHO was only doing its job. But this doesn't necessarily mean it's a dangerous pandemic, and this qualitative assessment of the threat is lacking on the global health authority's scale of risk. It is regrettable that the WHO has not yet got as far as giving an assessment of the dangerousness of the virus in addition to its assessment of how widespread it is."

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