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EDITORIALS: Wendy S Barclay and Maria Zambon Pandemic risks from bird flu BMJ 2004; 328: 238-239 [Full text]

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Proportionality

Ron Law   (30 January 2004)

Proportionality 30 January 2004
Ron Law, Risk analyst/Policy advisor Beyond Alternative Solutions Send response to journal: Re: Proportionality	Barclay and Zambon say that there is an outbreak of avian flu in Asia causing economic problems. The economic problems are only due to the public health response, not the outbreak per se. Last year we had SARS -- Perhaps 800 are said to have died during a period that some 250,000 or more died from normal influenza -- perhaps as many as 30,000 in the USA alone -- many of them people who had trusted officials promises of protection by using a vaccine that turned out to only benefit the pharmaceutical industry. This year it's avian flu -- something that's been around for many years but this year seems to have been caught up in the public health bureaucracy fuelled media frenzy looking for a dooms-day headline. Meanwhile, during the past two years perhaps more that half a million citizens of the world have been killed as a result highly preventable medical injury due to properly regulated medicine, and yet there has hardly been a headline and certainly no globally co-ordinated public health response to such a real public health problem. Why is that? Why is there no proportionality? Why are deaths associated with medical injury not investigated by independent bodies so that this carnage can be reduced? Competing interests: The Author was a member of the New Zealand Ministry of Health appointed working group that advised the ministry on the reporting and management of medical injury in the health system.