On Nov. 1, President Bush asked Congress for $7.1 billion to prepare the United States for an avian flu pandemic.
Is that too little too late?
While the US Department of Health and Human Services revealed plans for possible travel restrictions and closing of schools to limit the spread of the virus should there be a widespread outbreak in the US, the kind of travel that can't be controlled may bring avian flu here.
"The president's announcement is a first step in the right direction. However, the administration has been slow to react. Knowledge of this virus and the dire potential has been in the scientific community for years," Dr. David J. Moriarty, a California State Polytechnic University at Pomona biology professor, wrote in an email.
"The last plan that I saw was for vaccine for 20 million people, and we have about 300 million in the United States," Moriarty continued. "The plan also places a large burden on state government, which will be difficult for states to meet, particularly those states already devastated by hurricanes. A problem at this level requires an aggressive, comprehensive response at the federal level."
Cal Tech microbiologist Alice Huang also expressed dismay at the president's current plan.
"To focus the nation on one disease and provide money to stockpile drugs and vaccines is a good start. Unfortunately, only 20 million individuals out of a country of some 300 million will be protected. That leaves out the question of control and distribution," Huang noted. "Moreover, the production of drugs and vaccines will need to be ramped up considerably."
Huang explained, "When resources are limited, it becomes clear that not all individuals will have equal access to the resource. In the case of the flu vaccine, it will have to be decided by someone as to where, when and with whom the vaccine would do the most good. If the deployment is not carefully considered, having 20 million doses of the vaccine may not do any good at all."
How, indeed, when last year, flu-shot supplies fell short and when this year, the flu shot isn't readily available either? In both cases, the viruses targeted are less deadly than severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, or the avian flu.
Historic warnings
Recent signs of dangerous bird flu came before 1997, when an outbreak in Hong Kong poultry infected 18 people there, killing six. But the first warnings came earlier than that.
Professor Jim Strauss, a virologist at Cal Tech, wrote via email that it was learned years ago that the world's reservoir of influenza was waterfowl, with birds being the ultimate source of the disease. Strauss explained that there are 15 types of hemagglutinin (H1 to H15) and nine of neuraminidase (N1 to N9). These are the surface glycoproteins of flu, and all are present in waterfowl.
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Article comments
1 - Bennett
Great Post! Thanks so much for the clearly presented information.
Purple Tigress, you are the best!
2 - Dr. Kurt
Now, we wait for a Libertarian to post a reply decrying socialized medicine, big government, and the need for lowered vaccine regulations; then, a Neocon will advocate massive subsidies to multinational pharmaceutical companies, so long as poor Americans pay the brunt of the price...
If we aren't worried, we aren't paying attention! Thanks for the info.
3 - Nancy
As I've mentioned on previous articles' posts, IF it happens, just because it's a "pandemic" doesn't mean necessarily it's going to be deadly. The MSM are hyping it for all it's worth because it sells; the various health orgs are hyping it for all it's worth because it's a chance for them to get funding from nervous governments, & the governments are hyping it because that way they can claim they tried to do something to prevent the problem when & if it DOES go down, so they can get re-elected.
If it DOES explode into a pandemic, chances are it will happen so quickly, there's nothing anyone can do about it - including the government, WHO, the CDC, or anyone else including the pope. Got news for ya: if there's a vaccine (& I'm willing to bet a considerable amount there already is) you & I ain't gonna be among those who get it; that will be reserved for the rich, influential (i.e. congress & their dirty friends), & famous.
Therefore, there's no point in agonizing, fixating, or hyperventilating over it, or allowing the media/government or anyone else to stampede the public with it. Just wash your hands. A lot.
4 - Purple Tigress
Pandemic only means an epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large portion of the population.
Any influenza epidemic has the possibility of death of certain high-risk groups. However, even if the mortality rate is relatively low, if you or yours belongs to the unlucky percentage, you won't feel it was something that should have been ignored.
Being fatalistic isn't the solution. We've had warnings since 1957 and then again we had a 1997 wake-up call. We were slow to move.
Doing nothing more than washing your hands won't help institute change and it won't help Americans be prepared now or in the future.
We have made considerable progress against small pox, cholera, typhus and polio. Perhaps if we as Americans were less concerned about sexual orientation and showed more concern for African nations, we could have acted more quickly against AIDS.
5 - Liberal
Wait - didn't we all die already from Legionnaire's disease? Or was it West Nile virus? Or Saars? Or Mad Cow disease? Or shark attacks? Or hypodermic needles on the beach? Or was it the comet Kahoutek? I can't remember what killed us all but something must have. They keep telling us that something is going to kill us all. Aren't we all dead by now?
6 - Purple Tigress
I believe I addressed the tendency for media to sensationalize diseases.
According to the CDC, Legionnaires' disease hospitalizes between 8,000 and 18,000 people every year. Death occurs in 5% to 30% of patients.
BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) or Mad Cow disease has a low transmission rate from cows to humans and a low discovery rate. It has a high transmission rate between sheep and cows. This is a progressive disease, often not showing up until long after the contaminated source has been digested. The warning in the UK went unheeded for years. As of June 2005, 177 cases were reported worldwide with 156 in the UK. While the risk of BSE is low in the US, this year a cow was identified with BSE and related herd members have not all been accounted for. There might be more cases worldwide, however, identifying this disease requires an autopsy of the brain and this is not usually requested. There is a man in Texas who seems to be suffering from vCJD (variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) which his family believes he got from eating goat/sheep in the Middle East.
West Niles disease is through mosquito bites. Mosquito have a limited life span and are confined to certain areas. About 80 percent of the people have no symptoms. However of the 16,000 reported cases there have been 650 deaths.
SARS spreads by person to person close contact. A total of 8,098 people have become sick since 2003 and 774 died. Only eight were in the US. All of these people had traveled to locations of the world with SARS.
Since 2003, 100 human cases of avian flu (H5N1) have been reported. These have all been a result of close contact with feces, saliva or other contaminated secretaions or with contaminated surfaces. Unlike SARS, the spread cannot be controlled by limiting the movement of humans. The transmission is easier than BSE.
As a result of the outcry against BSE, standards for beef cattle have changed almost worldwide. BTW, I should add that there is a bigger problem in the US with CWD, chronic wasting disease which seems to spontaneously occur in deer and there is a caution, but no controls over eating venison.
The first evidence of AIDS was in 1959, found in the plasma of a man from what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. For a time, it was looked on as a black African disease and used by racists to justify white superiority. In the US, it became known as a gay male disease in the 1980s even though HIV was found in tissue samples of an American teenager who died in St. Louis in 1969 (per wikipedia.org).
HIV is found in our nearest relatives--primates. The eating of so-called bush meat by Africans and by rich non-Africans can also have contributed to the spread of disease in humans as well as the ownership of exotic primates. If we had not been so prejudiced toward gay men, could we have controlled AIDS sooner? If Magic Johnson hadn't become HIV positive, would it have taken longer?
It required famous people and not so famous people passionately advocating change and the deaths of famous people to turn the public's attitude around IMHO.
If people actively pursue and advocate change, we can have safety and health measure in place before avian flu has the chance to become a pandemic.
7 - elle
Purple Tigress,
I highly enjoyed your response. Just fyi, though, you have written several inaccuracies about the current scientific perceptions of BSE that I want to set right just in case someone needs the info. There is in fact no evidence of transmission of scrapie from sheep to cows and for hundreds of years sheep have been succumbing to prion disease without evidence that humans have been at all affected (although, of course, the hard science is missing, so there may be a super low, nearly undetectable transmission rate). After thorough retrospective analysis, scientists point towards cannibalistic feed practices as the reason that the BSE epidemic arose in English cattle, comparable to the start of the kuru epidemic in New Guinea. Also, there are several indications that we may have our own strain of BSE in America that has been around for a while, and perhaps has been the cause of sCJD. For relevant reading material, please see Prusiner's article in Science, 1997 and the book Deadly Feasts by Rhodes (a fantastic book, btw).