Advocacy groups deplore cuts to WHO talks agenda

GENEVA (Reuters) - H1N1 flu, while worrying, should not have been allowed to knock other health threats such as hepatitis and food safety from the agenda of this week's World Health Organization congress, advocacy groups said on Wednesday.

The U.N. agency's annual assembly was shortened to five days from nine to allow officials to compare notes on pandemic readiness then return home sooner to track the new strain that has killed 80 people and infected more than 10,000.

Campaigners for issues that were dropped, such as organ and tissue transplants, fake drugs, research standards and Chagas disease, bemoaned the decision to allow the virus that has caused mainly mild symptoms largely to eclipse the meeting.

"It is right that the WHO is taking H1N1 so seriously and is making preparations. But to allow a single disease to overshadow everything else is, I think, very unfortunate," said Charles Gore, president of the World Hepatitis Alliance.

Gemma Ortiz of Medecins Sans Frontieres said she was "completely amazed and gutted at the same time" when she found out discussions on Chagas, an insect-borne disease, had been postponed until 2010.

She said the international community needed to focus on the 14 million people, mainly in Latin America, infected with Chagas and the 15,000 a year who die from it.

"The numbers sort of speak for themselves, for us," said Ortiz, who had hoped the World Health Assembly would remind governments of the need to improve diagnosis and treatment for the disease. "We really missed an opportunity," she said.

The shortened agenda delayed for a year discussion of a resolution on viral hepatitis, which afflicts 500 million people and kills one person every 30 seconds.

Gore said the decision to put off that text, which aims to boost awareness, prevention, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of hepatitis B and C, was regrettable.

"One million people will die before the World Health Assembly next meets in 2010," he said. "It does not sit comfortably with me putting something on that scale to the side."

POLIO AND TUBERCULOSIS

At the meeting, which ends on Friday, the WHO's 193 member governments were considering issues other than flu, including the drive to eradicate polio and to control drug-resistant tuberculosis, which was initially dropped and then put back on the agenda at the insistence of China.

They will wait to discuss other topics such as the health risks from contaminated food, which has made headlines in the past year after melamine was found in Chinese powdered milk and salmonella in peanuts in the United States.

The director of the WHO's food safety department, Jorgen Schlundt, said the Geneva congress would have been a forum to receive feedback from governments on food-borne diseases and to improve links between different food safety authorities.

"It makes it a little bit more difficult but it is not going to stop anything," Schlundt said.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan defended the decision to compress the meeting as a result of H1N1 flu.

"This Health Assembly has been shortened for a good reason. Health officials are right now too important to be away from their home countries for more than a few days," she told the opening session on Monday.

"At the same time, we cannot, we dare not, let concerns about a pandemic overshadow or interrupt other vital health programs," she said, stressing that efforts to bolster medical care in advance of a pandemic could prove helpful for "any other public health emergency of international concern."

(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)