[Mb-civic] World Not Set To Deal With Flu - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

<>World Not Set To Deal With Flu
Strategy for Pandemic Needed, Experts Say

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 31, 2005; Page A01

Public health officials preparing to battle what they view as an 
inevitable influenza pandemic say the world lacks the medical weapons to 
fight the disease effectively, and will not have them anytime soon.

Public health specialists and manufacturers are working frantically to 
develop vaccines, drugs, strategies for quarantining and treating the 
ill, and plans for international cooperation, but these efforts will 
take years. Meanwhile, the most dangerous strain of influenza to appear 
in decades -- the H5N1 "bird flu" in Asia -- is showing up in new 
populations of birds, and occasionally people, almost by the month, 
global health officials say.

If the virus were to start spreading in the next year, the world would 
have only a relative handful of doses of an experimental vaccine to 
defend against a disease that, history shows, could potentially kill 
millions. If the vaccine proved effective and every flu vaccine factory 
in the world started making it, the first doses would not be ready for 
four months. By then, the pathogen would probably be on every continent.

<>Theoretically, antiviral drugs could slow an outbreak and buy time. 
The problem is only one licensed drug, oseltamivir, appears to work 
against bird flu. At the moment, there is not enough stockpiled for 
widespread use. Nor is there a plan to deploy the small amount that 
exists in ways that would have the best chance of slowing the disease.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/30/AR2005073001429.html?referrer=email 

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