And that, in turn, has important consequences: as Jack Fisher, a professor of surgery at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine, observed, “Keep crying ‘wolf,’ and WHO can expect lower than customary compliance with flu vaccine advisories next fall.” Worse, imagine what would happen when we encounter a genuinely dangerous new pathogen, such as a strain of H5N1 avian flu (which in its current form has a mortality rate more than 100 times higher than H1N1) that is easily transmissible between humans.
错误警报导致“流行病爆发”的结论不仅毫无意义，而且还降低了整个警报系统的可信度。而这反过来造成的后果又非常严重：正如圣迭戈加州大学医学院的外科教授杰克·费舍尔所说的那样，“不停地喊‘狼来了’，人们对世卫组织明年秋天流感疫苗公告的重视程度就会降低。”如果我们碰到了像H5N1禽流感病毒那样真正危险又很容易在人间传播的新病原体（其目前形式的致死率比H1N1病毒高100倍），那情况就会更加糟糕。