Getting your player ready...
WASHINGTON — A top World Health Organization official Thursday dismissed charges that the agency exaggerated the threat posed by the H1N1 virus and that it had been unduly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry to issue dire warnings about the swine-flu pandemic.
“The world is going through a real pandemic. The description of it as a fake is both wrong and irresponsible,” Keiji Fukuda, the special adviser to the WHO director-general on pandemic influenza, told reporters. Fukuda’s defense of the Geneva-based arm of the United Nations came as the agency has received increasing criticism, primarily in Europe, that it overstated the threat posed by the virus.
