Word: pennington
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Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine an alternate scenario in which critics would now be accusing the agency of failing to warn countries properly of the H1N1 threat. Hugh Pennington, a microbiologist at the University of Aberdeen who has advised the British government on past public-health crises, says the WHO was obligated to raise the alarm as soon as H1N1's spread matched the medically accepted definition for a pandemic. He points out also that early news reports from Mexico and the U.S., where the virus first emerged, suggested a highly lethal disease...
...Still, Pennington says there are lessons to be learned. He says the vaccine surplus in many cases can be ascribed in part to countries' own pre-existing pandemic-preparedness plans. Many such plans, which were put in place in the mid-2000s, were based on the worst-case-scenario assumption that the next pandemic virus would be some variation of the highly lethal H5N1 bird-flu virus, which has so far killed 263 people. The U.K.'s plan, for example, which was automatically enacted when the WHO declared the H1N1 pandemic, predicted between 50,000 and 750,000 deaths from...
...Pennington says that to avoid similar situations of oversupply in the future, governments may want to plan a range of responses for the next flu pandemic, based on a virus' severity. But such evaluations of deadliness of an emerging disease are much harder to carry out than one would hope - if not impossible. And delaying action in response to an unpredictable new virus could potentially mean an increase in preventable deaths. "I think all countries recognize the desirability of flexibility in implementing pandemic plans. But exercising flexibility is really hard especially when large and complicated events like pandemics are often...
...conclusively linking deaths to a vaccine can be difficult, Pennington says, pointing out that there is still debate among experts as to how many of the 1976 Guillain-Barré deaths were actually caused by the vaccine. For this reason, health officials fear that adverse reactions in vaccine recipients can make the already difficult job of convincing healthy people to receive inoculations even more challenging. For whatever reason, people tend to fear vaccines more than other medicines. This has been the case since the first vaccinations were given to prevent a spread of smallpox in England in the late 18th...
...cited example is concern over an autism link with the [measles, mumps and rubella] vaccine," Pennington says. "In America, high uptake of the vaccine led to the eradication of measles. But in Europe, enough parents refused to let their children have the vaccine that it gave the virus a home to circulate and continue to infect people." (Take TIME's swine flu quiz...