Why the swine flu virus is not a major threat

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TJ: No, I don’t, but when you look at the WHO pandemic preparedness document, which is 62 pages long, you see in the citation count only 2 references for hand washing, 3 for masks, 1 for gloves, 23 for vaccines and 18 for anti-viral drugs. What WHO should be pushing worldwide, especially for poor countries, are these public health interventions; instead, it’s pushing pharmacologic interventions. We now have clear evidence from our reviews that pharmaceutical industry-sponsored influenza vaccine studies have risen in importance and visibility, considerably more than non-pharmaceutical industry-sponsored studies. However, this is not explained either by size or quality of the studies which is the same. The likely, and very unpalatable, explanation for this finding is that the most prestigious scientific journals are more likely to print pharmaceutical industry-sponsored studies probably because of the money they make out of selling reprints of the studies and advertising space./.../