Health experts on a WHO probe which began on Monday said the lack of a severity assessment and fears raised by the deadly bird flu hampered the response to the swine flu pandemic over the past year.
The issues were raised by several of the 29 experts in their inaugural meeting to examine the controversial response to the first flu pandemic of the 21st century.
"We want to know what worked well. We want to know what went wrong and ideally why," World Health Organisation Director General Margaret Chan told the panel of external specialists meeting in Geneva.
"We want to know what can be done better and ideally how," she added, nearly a year after global alarm was raised over the new swine flu strain uncovered in the United States and Mexico.
Swine flu has affected 213 countries or territories since April 2009, leaving 17,700 people dead, according to the WHO.
The probe was set up following accusations that the agency-led international reaction to A(H1N1) influenza, including a pandemic declaration last June, was overblown and may have been tainted by commercial interests.
Panel members said that while sporadic outbreaks of more lethal bird flu had given crucial boost to international preparations for a pandemic before swine flu appeared, they had also raised expectations about the severity of a new virus.
Australian infectious diseases specialist John Mackenzie said that public reaction became guarded when the new A(H1N1) influenza virus turned out be less lethal even though the UN health agency had declared a pandemic.
"It was to our disbenefit in a sense," he told his colleagues.
"It wasn't that mild when you see the number of deaths in the young, but the customer expected it to be much more severe," said Mackenzie, who has been closely involved in determining the response to the swine flu pandemic.
Professor Harvey Fineberg of Washington's Institute of Medicine, who was appointed chairman of the WHO panel, said it was "a very central problem."
Officials told the panel that stronger International Health Regulations which came into force in 2007, pandemic preparedness plans and stockpiling of anti-viral drugs had proved vital in tackling fast spreading swine flu.
However, WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda acknowledged: "H5N1 (bird flu) really sent up expectations not only among planners but also among populations. It really set the emotional tone."
Several of the health specialists, who are mainly attached to public authorities in 28 countries, also raised the need for an additional severity assessment in the flu alert rulebook approved by the WHO's 193 member states.
Currently the six phase international alert system culminates with a pandemic, which primarily denotes global geographic spread, an issue that led to "confusion," according to panel members.
Kuku Voyi, a public health professor at South Africa's University of Pretoria suggested a "bandwidth" of severity could allow a better response.
But there were warnings that the impact of swine flu varied in different settings, with a greater threat to impoverished countries or among groups such as pregnant women or the young.
The International Health Regulations Review Committee's work is expected to take about nine months, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said.
Chan promised an "independent credible and transparent" examination, without restrictions on its scope.
Parliamentarians conducting a Council of Europe probe have criticised the transparency of decision-making and especially the potential influence of the pharmaceutical industry on a decision last year to press for vaccination.
That inquiry was set up after several governments sought to cancel mass orders of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of swiftly developed special pandemic vaccines after fears about the severity of swine flu waned.
Fukuda said the need for a single dose of swine flu vaccine instead of the two expected had been "a big surprise."
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