Extracts from Ofcom Complaint, by Category: Misrepresentation of People’s Views

Links to Corporate-funded Lobby Groups

(For information about the following organisations and the funding they receive, see Appendix D: Corporate-funded Organisations Linked to Contributors to the Programme).

Professor Paul Reiter

Reiter is director of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He is a distinguished entomologist specialising in mosquitoes, but although he talked about climate change in the programme, he is not an expert on climate; nor is he an expert on the effects of large-scale environmental change on human health, which he also discussed. Reiter’s primary area of expertise is the mosquitoes that carry diseases other than malaria, such as those that carry the West Nile Fever virus: not malaria, nor malaria-carrying mosquitoes: yet the narrator of the film referred to him as “one of the world’s leading experts on malaria and other insect-borne diseases” (see Comment 110, page 16). In addition, his links with the IPCC were greatly overstated by the programme (see Comment 115, page 22).

Thus his credentials with respect to the specific subjects that he discussed in the film were greatly inflated by the film maker, and the public was seriously, and apparently intentionally misled about his expertise in these areas.

It should also have been pointed out that Reiter’s views on the relationship between climate and infectious disease are certainly not shared by all or even by most scientists working in this area. Here are some examples:

Tanser et al, 2003, http://tinyurl.com/yvqnxb, reports that “projected scenarios would estimate a 5–7% potential increase (mainly altitudinal) in malaria distribution with surprisingly little increase in the latitudinal extents of the disease by 2100”. In comparison, Reiter focuses on the much more ambitious task of predicting disease.

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