[Mb-civic] Bush suddenly wakes up to threat of avian flu - Thomas Oliphant - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Bush suddenly wakes up to threat of avian flu

By Thomas Oliphant, Globe Columnist  |  October 11, 2005

WASHINGTON
IF PRESIDENT BUSH had been awake at the switch earlier this year -- 
instead of, for example, obsessing about Social Security privatization 
schemes -- the United States would probably not find itself near the end 
of an international line for influenza medicine.

As it is, his sudden realization that the potential of a public health 
disaster looms has set of an unseemly governmental scramble that mostly 
misses the point.

Even now, the Bush response to repeated wakeup calls betrays a weird 
fixation on one of the less central questions that would be raised by 
the outbreak of a significant epidemic of avian flu -- whether the armed 
forces would have to be used to quarantine an invaded part of the country.

The most important point is that a well-governed modern society requires 
a sound public health infrastructure that citizens can look to with 
confidence if communicable disease threatens.

But the public health infrastructure -- four years after the 9/11 
attacks and the anthrax murders -- is more in disrepair than prepared, 
just as government was not ready to respond in a timely fashion to a 
predictable major storm in the Gulf of Mexico.

The immediate problem flowing from a lack of response to urgent pleas to 
get ready for an avian flu pandemic is that a widely recognized, useful 
drug is going to be difficult to stockpile quickly. Between last spring, 
when much of the industrialized world appears to have mobilized with 
greater urgency that the United States did, and last week when the Bush 
administration began going more public with its concerns, a great deal 
of very valuable time was lost.

The drug in question is called Tamiflu, manufactured by the 
international drug giant, Roche. According to public health experts, it 
is a rare medicine with proven effectiveness in greatly reducing the 
severity of influenza symptoms and shortening the disease's duration. 
Generally, to work optimally, Tamiflu needs to be taken within a couple 
of days of infection.

When concerns about a possible pandemic emerged earlier this year, 
several governments responded vigorously. In Scandinavia and in Britain, 
France, Canada, Japan, and Switzerland, orders were placed with Roche 
designed to provide enough medicine to treat 20-40 percent of their 
populations.

According to US officials, there is enough Tamiflu around in this 
country to help at most 2 percent of the population. Enough to treat a 
quarter of the total is prudent, but because of the long delay in 
responding, that is going to take a long time, possibly until the end of 
next year, leaving the nation vulnerable. Playing catch-up will be 
expensive -- multiple billions that, as we have discovered post-Iraq and 
post-Katrina, the country doesn't have except via more debt.

After dragging its feet for months, the administration has sprung to 
life with surprising and welcome alacrity. The point person has been 
Mike Leavitt, Bush's secretary of health and human services, who has a 
decent political reputation from his time as an effective governor of 
Utah. Over the last couple of weeks he has supervised detailed, rather 
scary briefings of reporters, of congressmen and senators, and last week 
of a group of senior administrations including Bush himself.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/11/bush_suddenly_wakes_up_to_threat_of_avian_flu/
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