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Contemporary risks are often understood as fundamentally uncertain. This uncertain status can be mobilized within political debates surrounding risks. Such a challenge serves to destabilize scientific claims. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) management of the 2009/10 spread of the H1N1 virus became a site of one such contestation. Debate within the Council of Europe particularly served to criticize the action of the WHO. This resulted in a definitional and policy contestation between the two institutions. The WHO accounted for its actions through allusions to (seemingly stable) scientific facts, using epidemiological evidence of influenza and its management based on normal science. In contrast, in criticizing public expenditure and panic, the Council of Europe critics problematized the stability of the science employed by the WHO. This included fundamental aspects of scientific knowledge such as the measurability of morbidity and mortality caused by H1N1 and the effect of vaccination against influenza viruses. This criticism relied upon the ability to destabilize the WHO’s scientific knowledge, a process made possible through understandings of the uncertain nature of the science of risk (post-normal science). The case study illustrates that potential for previous-established and seemingly stable scientific facts to become destabilized and problematized during contestations of risk management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The classification of novel disease events is central to public health action surrounding them. Drawing upon the sociology of scientific classification, this article examines the role and contestation of the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Alert Phases, as applied to the spread of 2009/10 H1N1 Influenza. The analysis of World Health Organization texts, including policy documents, public statements and epidemiological documents, has been utilized to examine the Organization’s actions and public narratives around the event of H1N1. Analytically, the functional role of such classificatory schemes and the social construction of scientific classifications are examined. It is argued that in understanding the World Health Organization’s 2009/10 application of the Pandemic Alert Phases, the critical limitation of the functions served by the classificatory scheme led to the breakdown of its construction. This case study highlights the importance of classification for the successful production of scientific ‘facts’, the constructed nature of classificatory systems and the potential for contestation that arises when such classifications do not adequately fulfil their functional roles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Infectious disease threats are surrounded by scientific uncertainty. As a result, institutional structures can heavily determine the way in which such risks are managed. This is illustrated by the World Health Organisation's (WHO) management of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Given this, theories of path dependency, derived from the ‘new institutionalism’, are useful in analysing such events. This article examines theories of institutional and discursive path dependency in respect to the case study of the WHO's management of H1N1. It argues that the WHO's emphasis on the use of vaccines as a protective measure constitutes a path dependent reaction, based on the organisation's historical achievements with vaccines and its discourse surrounding vaccine use. Furthermore, in contrast to accounts which understand historical and institutional path dependency as exclusive theoretical models, the article argues that institutional and discursive path dependencies were mutually interacting in forming the WHO's response to H1N1. Finally, the article explores the question of institutional change within theories of path dependency. Here, using the case of the WHO, it is shown that the interference of an outside actor, the Council of Europe, caused the WHO to internally evaluate its actions, leading to institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]