WHO knows better: Neither the world, nor the World Health Organization, is prepared for a real pandemic.
Washington Post
June 10, 2006

IT'S LONG BEEN the world's public health monitor, responsible for detecting and eradicating infectious diseases. Now the World Health Organization has accidentally acquired another role -- as a source of disarray in global financial markets. When the WHO announced a while back that the sixth member of a single Indonesian family had died after contracting the virus strain known as H5N1, stock markets that were already jumpy plunged. The Indonesian rupiah, the Singapore dollar and the Thai baht all fell against the U.S. dollar.

In fact, the agency had concluded that there was no bird flu pandemic: The family members who contracted the disease were all blood relatives living in close proximity to one another. Other family members, unrelated by blood, did not get sick, suggesting both that those who died had a genetic susceptibility, and that the virus has not in fact mutated in such a way that it is spread easily from human to human. Markets concluded otherwise.

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