Bird Flu: An Emergency Meeting to Fight Back
The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and WHO experts have warned that an influenza pandemic is certain to come, but there is no way to tell when.
Delegates from 80 nations and international agencies began a meeting on Thursday to formulate the best way to fight the growing outbreak of avian influenza before it can cause a human pandemic that could kill millions.
“The world is clearly unprepared, or inadequately prepared, for a geographically widespread epidemic of H5N1 influenza,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt told the meeting.
Everyone at the meeting, (sponsored by the U.S. State Department), has agreed in principle to share information quickly to allow health experts to contain the virus if it makes the jump to infect people very easily.
The H5N1 avian influenza virus has killed or forced the destruction of tens of millions of birds and infected more than 100 people, killing at least 60 in four Asian nations since late 2003.
Scientists fear the virus will mutate so that it is able to be easily transmitted among humans, triggering a pandemic that could kill millions and even tens of millions in a worst-case scenario.
“We’re certainly overdue,” Klaus Stohr the WHO’s top official for influenza coordination, told the Infectious Disease Society of America in San Francisco. “Preparedness is key,” he said. Millions have died in past influenza pandemics, the worst of which occurred in 1918 when the “Spanish flu” virus killed as many as 50 million people. The WHO has been tracking the bird flu virus, taking samples and sending them to labs to be tested for mutations.
Scientists and officials have complained that certain countries, which they will not name, have not always shared that information quickly. SARS is one example, noted the HHS official. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome first started affecting people in China’s Guangdong province in late 2002, but it was not reported until months later. By June 2003 it had swept to several cities around the world, infecting close to 8,000 people and killing about 800 before it was stopped.
President George W. Bush did not join the meeting but was scheduled to confer with top vaccine manufacturers on Friday to discuss ways to make it easier for them to make flu vaccines for the U.S. market.
Vaccine makers have long complained that liability laws, difficulties in winning Food and Drug Administration approval and an uncertain market have made it unappealing to make vaccines for U.S. consumers.
link: Reuters
A proper early global coordination is required to intervene the epidemic in time. Without that kind of early cooperation, we will pull back to the next firebreak because we will have to begin to protect ourselves.
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