Why Journalists Should be Wary of the WHO

Last year CTV’s Lloyd Robertson reported on a bogus World Health Organization study that said the gene responsible for natural blonde hair would be extinct in 200 years. CNN, CBS and other major news organizations across the globe fell for the bait. A week later, it was revealed that the story was a hoax by someone claiming to be a WHO staffer.

When the WHO speaks, the world media listen like lambs in a petting zoo. Why, exactly? The Geneva-based organization has, at times, been an overtly political organ. Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO’s Director-General, has chastised ethically unacceptable biotechnology research which is carried out in the industrialized world, and is primarily market-driven. She sneers at tobacco companies’ unhealthy hunt for profits.

Given the WHO’s penchant for political posturing, it’s entirely possible that it was playing politics when it recommended against non-essential travel to Toronto on account of the SARS outbreak. It had to appear even-handed in what had earlier been seen as an epidemic striking Asian nations.

Public-health leaders in Toronto have marshaled unassailable evidence that, if nothing else, WHO’s decision to single out Toronto was based on flawed empiricism. As Health Canada’s Dr. Paul Gully has noted, the WHO’s choice to warn travelers about Toronto was largely based on five sketchy cases of suspected SARS, all of which have shown no evidence of transmission after a 10-day period.

The WHO, it should be noted, has a record of questionable empiricism. And yet, many journalists tend to swallow scary-sounding WHO research and press releases wholesale. In 1996, Canadian reporters jumped on a WHO study suggesting that teenage Canadian girls laboured under more stress than school-aged children in 24 other countries. This was based on the evidence, deduced from self-reported surveys, that 61 percent of Canadian 13-year-old girls had taken headache medicine in the past month (the highest proportion reported by any country). The lowest score was 18 percent, in Slovakia. Yet it’s pretty likely that headache medicine is more plentiful in Canada than Slovakia.

Evidence of bad statistics used to prop up an ideological agenda may be seen most glaringly in the WHO’s global rankings of health systems. In 2000, the United States placed 37th on the list, just below Costa Rica and just above Slovenia. Canada came in 30th ‹ behind Morocco, Cyprus, Colombia, and Oman.

The WHO’s health-system rankings presuppose that the objective of good health is really two-fold: the best attainable average level -- goodness -- and the smallest feasible differences among individuals and groups -- fairness. The essential problem with the fairness metric is that it might favour a society where everyone dies prematurely rather than one in which the wealthier half live longer because of access to better medications.

Remarkably, the WHO ranks Cuba at near parity with Canada in overall health-care performance -- even though clean bandages are hard to find in Havana’s hospitals. The reason for Cuba¹s high ranking owes to the fact that it spends a large proportion of public funds on health -- a statistically dubious barometer of fairness.

Accountable to no one, the WHO is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Its constitution goes beyond the eradication of disease -- the traditional public health mandate. Rather, it encompasses the utopian state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.

This fuzzy portfolio, when combined with an army of researchers with vast budgets, can produce a never-ending litany of scare stories for journalists. The WHO report on obesity published last year is typical. Among women, over half (53%) of all deaths can be directly or indirectly related to their obesity, it found. By using the slippery words, indirectly, the WHO lumped together cases of bad eating habits with severe, life-threatening obesity -- thus trivializing an important public-health issue.

In 1996, the WHO published a report on the number of child deaths in Iraq since August 1990 (the invasion of Kuwait and the beginning of the embargo). It conducted no independent study of its own, and relied only on figures from the Iraqi regime to establish that the excessive death toll among children under five was 4,500 per month, all as a direct result of the embargo. These numbers have been repeated by media around the world. Yet the only independent study of child mortality in Iraq (by an epidemiologist and statistician, Dr. Richard Garfield of Columbia University) reduced the figure to about 1,850 per month. Even these figures can be misleading if used to suggest that sanctions alone, and not the regime of Saddam Hussein, is the cause of those deaths.

None of this is meant to tarnish much of the excellent work of the WHO. The WHO has long been involved in projects to develop safe drinking-water supplies and sanitation. To help combat malaria, which causes more than 1 million deaths each year, mostly in Africa, the WHO has launched a partnership of governments and development agencies to cut the burden of malaria in half by 2010.

The essential problem may lie not so much with the WHO itself, but with journalists, most of whom are not trained in epidemiology or public-health. Just because a study or press release carries the imprimatur of the WHO should not mean it is sacrosanct.