Another health scare, another fine line to tread for the Commission

Date: 20/10/05

When scientists confirmed on 15 October that avian influenza had been detected in Romania, the European Commission was faced once again with the challenge of dealing with an EU health scare.

With national headlines feeding fears that migrating birds would spread the potentially deadly disease across Europe, Philip Tod, Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou's spokes-man, compared the experience to walking a tightrope between withholding information and fanning the flames of panic.

"There is a fine line to tread between explaining to the public that this is currently an animal, rather than a human, health risk, and living up to our responsibility to warn people of all the dangers," Tod said.

But the approach taken by the Commission this month seems different from that adopted in response to other health scares of the past decade, such as mad cow disease (BSE), the dioxin contamination, classical swine fever (CSF) and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). Whereas CSF and FMD are animal diseases that do not carry a public health threat, the H5N1 avian flu strain has already killed humans and could mutate into a form of human flu.

The then European health commissioner Emma Bonino described the 1997 BSE outbreak as a "crisis", and stressed the Commission's duty to shore up fragile consumer confidence.

Under her guidance, scientific committees and a health risk assessment unit were set up to advise the Commission on dealing with human health concerns. Health had only just been endorsed as an EU competence in the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty.

Bonino's successor David Byrne took broadly the same line. For him, too, BSE was a European crisis, especially when having been predominantly a British problem, it broke into continental Europe during 2000.

When FMD broke out in 2001 Byrne remarked on "one of the biggest animal disease crises ever recorded": a "painful experience" springing from an "explosive cocktail" of events.

The combination of the second phase of BSE, CSF and FMD led to a revamp of the Commission's scientific advisory committees and the creation of the European Food Safety Authority, as the Commission struggled to make sure that scientific judgements were kept separate from politics.

Arguably the animal and human health scares strengthened Byrne's efforts to widen Commission involvement in health matters.

By contrast, Kyprianou and his office have, up to now, seemed keen to emphasise that the Commission has a purely administrative role to play in EU affairs and that bird flu is no exception.

Kyprianou has encouraged member states to stockpile anti-viral drugs and identify high-risk areas, but has stressed that the real work stays with national governments.

Speaking at an emergency EU health meeting after the Romanian results, Kyprianou calmly reminded ministers that bird flu was no more likely to mutate into a human virus than any other flu strain: "The fact that we have avian flu in Europe does not affect the possibility of a human influenza pandemic," he said. His spokesman has similarly offered updates and general briefings, but so far refused to elaborate on how the Commission would like EU countries to deal with the situation.

The shift in style might be attributed to the change in personalities, both of the commissioner and Robert Madelin, the director-general. Perhaps Cypriot company-lawyer Kyprianou just has a different working style to the occasionally passionate Byrne, who famously said he would like to ban smoking from every bar in Europe.

But the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) believes the Commission may have changed its approach in response to the experience of dealing with previous health scares. Anne Hoel of the EPHA said Kyprianou was far more alarmist several months ago in his warnings of the need to set up an EU flu centre than he is now that bird flu has been identified in the EU.

The change, she suggested, might be down to fears that if anything went wrong national governments would blame the Commission. "If it is a disaster the Commission doesn't want governments to say 'it's because of Brussels', as it has in the past."

Hoel pointed out that with both BSE and FMD, governments ended up dealing with the problem as each saw fit, regardless of Commission advice, and that it might have decided simply not to waste its breath.

Whatever the backstage thinking, Hoel said the attitude adopted was "a very bad communication plan".

"This kind of crisis is where the Commission could bring some added value - it's where we need the EU. A virus knows no boundaries."

Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the UK's University of Kent, is the author of Politics of Fear, a book looking at the way modern politicians communicate risk. He said the Commission's approach remained essentially un-changed and that it was now, as in the past, pandering to public concern. Reactions to health scares from the EU executive could, if anything, be seen as growing increasingly precautionary, he said.

According to Furedi, although the Commission was "not as alarmist as some national figures", such as the UK's chief medical officer who recently predicted bird flu would kill 50,000 people in the UK alone, it was still not being level-headed. "This is the kind of reaction they could have made any year. Acting as though there is a potential plague is just not warranted - flu epidemics happen now and then, but more people die every year from infections like listeria."

With critics accusing Brussels of doing both too much and not enough about the latest EU health scare, Commission officials must be wondering where that fine line is hiding.

Author suggests that the European Commission was trying to play down the possibility of a human flu pandemic while the virus was coming to Europe in the form of avian influenza. The situation is compared to previous outbreaks of animal diseases and food scandals.