An independent medical panel blasted the World Health Organization — the group that prompted worldwide headlines about UV and sunbeds in 2009 by calling sunbeds as dangerous as arsenic and mustard gas — for conflicts of interest among members of its advisory panels that may affect policy decisions, the Associated Press reported this week.

The expert panel — commissioned by WHO to evaluate that group’s widely criticized over-trumping of the 2009 H1N1 swine flu “pandemic” — was referring to WHO experts who had ties to pharmaceutical companies who made millions selling H1N1 vaccine based on WHO’s reports which spread panic about the virus. But the panel’s ruling could also be applied to WHO’s handling of the “sunbed/mustard gas” committee, members of which also had direct and indirect ties to pharmaceutical companies who market chemical sunscreen and to the dermatology industry, which markets all-out sun avoidance to sell its cosmetic services.

“The group described WHO’s definition of a pandemic and its phases as “needlessly complex,” criticized the agency’s decision to keep the members of its advisory committee secret, and said potential conflicts of interest among those experts, some of whom had ties to drug companies, were not well managed,” the Associated Press reported.

WHO staff — who months after the July 2009 “sunbed/mustard gas” story spread worldwide admitted that the evidence against sunbeds was “limited” — are now being criticized for allowing profiteers inroads to help shape WHO policy. The panel, according to AP, “warned that under WHO’s health oversight, the world is not ready to handle a major health disaster in the future.”

WHO has allowed its name to be used to suggest that sunbed centers are linked to higher rates of melanoma in those under age 35, despite the fact that the data in those studies includes home tanning units, medical phototherapy usage of sunbeds under doctors directions and subjects with skin type I who do not tan in sunbed centers. Home units and phototherapy units were associated with higher risk, but professional sunbed centers were not, according to the data the WHO panel studied for under-35 tanners.

To read the AP story click here.