Udo Buchholz is epidemiologist at the Germany’s Robert Koch Institute. That's the country's central governmental institute for disease prevention and control. DW-TV: Mr. Buchholz, usually the very old and the very young are at risk from influenza. Why were young and middle-aged people being so affected by what we were calling swine flu? Udo Buchholz: Well, if we differentiate between illness itself and severe illness or death it is always like this that the younger population is more affected with illness at all. Um, this issue this time may have been that the elderly could have had contact with this type of virus or a similar type of virus when they were very very young. So very few of them have been infected at all, but if they have been infected they still have a very high risk of also dying of severe disease. And it is always like this that we observe it when we have pandemics that a much larger proportion than usual is heavily affected in younger population.   Now, the World Health Organization did classify this H1N1 variant that we saw this past winter as a pandemic but in the end the deathtoll was a lot smaller than was expected. Was this blown out of proportion or did we just get lucky? No, I think if we use the term pandemic it only means that it is the virus that causes disease and that spreads very quickly all over the world and that has obviously happened also. The issue is that in fact also our institute, we have expected that the virus would be much more virulent or much more severe. This hasn't happened but we have also reacted to this and have tried to reduce the measures as fast as that would have possible, as soon as we have seen that it is not as severe as we saw. So that is very important that we communicate very clearly and very honestly to the population what is going on and what we can do. On the other hand it is definitely not so that is just a cold, because as you know people have died and young people have died also,...