Decisions for extensive public health interventions must be made based on information without any influence by lobbies, mainly because those decisions are affecting many (also healthy) people and normally require a huge amount of public funding. The current estival swine flu scare therefore prompted the LBI-HTA to help decision makers currently working on the national pandemic plan make objective decisions, by providing key data and facts about the „new influenza“.

Concerning the classification of the World Health Organization (WHO), the dimension of the „new influenza“ spread has been set at level 6 (of 8). In contrast, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), who assesses the risk using the „Pandemic Severity Index (PSI) - which refers to lethality (the number of deaths in relation to the number of infected people) – rates the disease at level 2 (of 5). The WHO classification is a life cycle model, based on the global dispersion of the virus. According to the CDC’s calculations, the annual seasonal influenza causes up to 1 death per 1000 patients (0,10%), which equals a PSI of 1. In the United Kingdom (the country registering the most „new influenza“ cases in Europe at present) the lethality of the „new flu“ is about 0,14% (PSI 2 = 0,11-0,5%). Due to many harmless and unapparent courses of the „new influenza“, the real dimension of its expansion is at risk of being UNDERestimated and thus the actual mortality rate in danger of being OVERvalued.