I couldn't resist the temptation to draw Asia into the debate between Europe and the US. Rather than ask the Asian panelists to theorize about the impact of austerity in the overly indebted developed West, I asked them to assess their own experiences during and after the crisis of the late 1990 s.

In fact, the WHO repeatedly violated Sherlock Holmes warning, It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. And the pandemic alert was doubly strange, given that ordinary seasonal flu sweeps the world annually, is invariably far more lethal than the currently circulating low virulence H1N1, and certainly meets the WHO s definition of a pandemic infections over a wide geographic area and affecting a large proportion of the population.