Avian flu pandemic and vaccine
When a President starts musing like this at a press conference, we pay attention (via Seattle Times):
“The policy questions for a president in dealing with an avian-flu outbreak are difficult,” Bush said. “One example: If we had an outbreak somewhere in the United States, do we not then quarantine that part of the country? And how do you, then, enforce a quarantine? … And who best to be able to effect a quarantine?” He did not answer his questions but after the last one, he said: “One option is the use of a military that’s able to plan and move. So that’s why I put it on the table. I think it’s an important debate for Congress to have.”
The 1918 flu killed 50 million people. 50 million deaths in 1918 would be 175 million today, and the total could possibly be much greater because of the wide availability of global travel. Note the similarity of today’s avian flu to the 1918 pandemic strain, via WSJ:
Two teams of scientists reported that they re-created the influenza virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918 and 1919. The findings suggest that the threat of an avian-flu pandemic might be greater than previously thought. Researchers from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Mount Sinai School of Medicine said that the historic, killer flu-bug strain probably originated as an avian bug and then spread in humans without undergoing complicated changes that many experts had thought necessary for a human pandemic….
The findings by Dr. Taubenberger and his team of researchers, published in Nature, follow a nine-year effort to decode the 1918 strain by sequencing its eight genes. The research concluded that the pandemic flu outbreak was most likely caused by an avian virus. The scientists also discovered 10 mutations that distinguish the 1918 virus from avian bugs, suggesting changes that the virus made to adapt to a human host, they said. They also noted that some of those mutations are also present in the currently circulating H5N1 virus, suggesting it could make the jump to humans in a similarly rapid and alarming way.
In the second study, published in Science, scientists from the CDC and Mount Sinai took the decoded virus and re-created it, using a process known as reverse genetics. The virus they created, in a secure CDC lab, was “exceptionally virulent,” quickly killing embryonated chicken eggs and mice, said Terence Tumpey, a senior scientist at the CDC who led the effort. The team also found that the 1918 bug had an unusual ability to penetrate cells that flu bugs don’t usually reach deep in the lungs, providing some clues as to why its symptoms were so severe.
If people got hysterical because of the media’s hyping of Katrina, what would happen in a genuine, broad-based crisis, when an effective vaccine might not be widely available for a year (Seattle Times):
Bush said he is encouraging work on a new vaccine against avian flu. 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. 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. Bush said he used his visit to the United Nations last month to “talk to as many leaders as I could find” about the need to report outbreaks quickly. “Obviously, the best way to deal with a pandemic is to isolate it and keep it isolated in the region in which it begins…. We’re watching it very carefully,” Bush said.
Part of President Bush’s concern apparently stemmed from reading The Great Influenza, by John Barry. We just bought our copy; hopefully we’ll finish it before we begin coughing.