This is really not good! From the A/P as reported in the Dallas Morning News:

Leading a multinational team of medical experts to mobilize Southeast Asian nations against bird flu, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Monday the likelihood of a flu pandemic in the future is “very high.”

Leavitt, accompanied by the director of the World Health Organization and other top health professionals, is visiting Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to seek their collaboration in preparing for the anticipated public health emergency.
DallasNews.com/extra

In the past 2 1/2 years, the H5N1 strain of bird flu has swept through poultry populations in Southeast Asia, also infecting humans and killing at least 65 people. The virus does not pass from person to person easily, but experts believe this could change if the virus mutates.

Leavitt said there were three influenza pandemics in the last century and “the likelihood of another is very high, some say even certain.”

“Whether or not H5N1 is the virus that will ultimately trigger such a pandemic is unknown to us,” he said at a news conference. “The probability is uncertain. But the warning signs are troubling. Hence we are responding in a robust way.”

Newsweek highlights the Race Against Avian Flu while Reuters reports that some experts say that vaccines and drugs, such as Tamiflu, will not be the answer to stop an avian flu pandemic.

Many governments around the world are stockpiling antiviral drugs and some companies are trying to speed up vaccine production but these measure give a false sense of security and will do little to counter a flu pandemic, an expert cautioned on Monday.

Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who has been studying the risk of pandemic flu for decades and is a U.S. government adviser, said governments should be preparing to cope with the pandemic instead of relying entirely on the hope of using vaccines and drugs to control it.

If the H5N1 avian flu begins to easily infect humans, it will move too quickly for drugs and vaccines to be of much use, Osterholm said.

“It doesn’t matter if we have a vaccine now or not. We can’t make it,” Osterholm said in a telephone interview.

There were three flu pandemics in the 20th Century, the “Spanish flu“, 1918-1919, the “Asian Flu“, 1957-58 & the “Hong Kong Flu“, 1968-69.

The 1918-19 flu killed over 500,000 in the U.S., while the 1957-58 flu killed 70,000 and the 1968-69 flu killed 34,000. Sounds like a good trend, but when you consider that the last two pandemics were versions of established human flu viruses, and that new research is showing that the 1918 flu was most likely a variation of avian influenza, similar to H5N1 that is worrying us today, there is no good trend to consider.

Control measures are paramount if a pandemic is discovered to be happening. A vaccine would be 6 months or more away, and due to genetic mutation of the virus itself, maybe not even effective. The world will not be able to produce enough Tamiflu or Relenza in time, and mutations could make the virus resistant to them as well. The ease of world-wide travel would spread it in a matter of weeks, if not days, which is much too fast for our health agencies to act. In the third world, well — there just wouldn’t be a third world anymore . . .

Let’s all hope that we dodge the bullet this flu season, ’cause we sure aren’t ready now! (db)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Avian Flu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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