A flu nightmare - The Boston Globe -
A flu nightmare - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Editorials - News
THE RISK of a global flu pandemic should have been, but wasn't, at the top of the Group of Eight's agenda in Scotland last week. The world is ill prepared for the millions of deaths and economic dislocation that could occur if a lethal strain of avian flu virus in southeastern Asia mutates into a strain that is easily transmitted from person to person.
Each winter, flu kills on average 36,000 Americans, most of them frail and elderly. The nightmare is that a new and much more dangerous flu strain could emerge, like the one that killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918-19. The victims in that pandemic were mostly young adults who had not been exposed to earlier outbreaks of similar flu strains and thus had no natural immunity. The avian flu type that scientists are now concerned about, H5N1, gives signs of being even deadlier than the 1918 virus.
To reduce the toll of a new pandemic, governments and international health organizations must improve surveillance methods so that, if a lethal flu virus emerges, it can be quickly identified and isolated, though the latter is difficult with a disease as contagious as flu. In 2003, the US government adopted several measures to strengthen the nation's capacity for dealing with a pandemic, including the awarding of contracts to vaccine makers to develop an investigational vaccine for a strain of the H5N1 virus.
But immunization is a far-from-perfect solution to pandemic flu because development of a vaccine can begin only when researchers have identified the exact strain of flu virus. Using traditional production methods, the preparation of flu vaccine doses can require as much as six months, an unacceptably long time when billions around the world are being exposed to a deadly virus.
Also, flu vaccine makers worldwide have the capacity to provide vaccine doses for fewer than 500 million people, according to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. That capacity must be increased at the same time that governments subsidize efforts to develop faster methods of flu vaccine production.
Antiviral medications like Tamiflu can strengthen people's resistance to the virus before vaccines become available. The US government is creating a stockpile of Tamiflu, but Osterholm writes in Foreign Affairs magazine that orders that have been placed globally suffice for just 40 million people.
The outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2003, which killed fewer than 1,000 people but cost Asia $40 billion in economic losses, should have served as a warning of the devastating effect an infectious disease can have even when loss of life is relatively small. The response of world leaders has been inadequate to the challenge.
THE RISK of a global flu pandemic should have been, but wasn't, at the top of the Group of Eight's agenda in Scotland last week. The world is ill prepared for the millions of deaths and economic dislocation that could occur if a lethal strain of avian flu virus in southeastern Asia mutates into a strain that is easily transmitted from person to person.
Each winter, flu kills on average 36,000 Americans, most of them frail and elderly. The nightmare is that a new and much more dangerous flu strain could emerge, like the one that killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918-19. The victims in that pandemic were mostly young adults who had not been exposed to earlier outbreaks of similar flu strains and thus had no natural immunity. The avian flu type that scientists are now concerned about, H5N1, gives signs of being even deadlier than the 1918 virus.
To reduce the toll of a new pandemic, governments and international health organizations must improve surveillance methods so that, if a lethal flu virus emerges, it can be quickly identified and isolated, though the latter is difficult with a disease as contagious as flu. In 2003, the US government adopted several measures to strengthen the nation's capacity for dealing with a pandemic, including the awarding of contracts to vaccine makers to develop an investigational vaccine for a strain of the H5N1 virus.
But immunization is a far-from-perfect solution to pandemic flu because development of a vaccine can begin only when researchers have identified the exact strain of flu virus. Using traditional production methods, the preparation of flu vaccine doses can require as much as six months, an unacceptably long time when billions around the world are being exposed to a deadly virus.
Also, flu vaccine makers worldwide have the capacity to provide vaccine doses for fewer than 500 million people, according to Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. That capacity must be increased at the same time that governments subsidize efforts to develop faster methods of flu vaccine production.
Antiviral medications like Tamiflu can strengthen people's resistance to the virus before vaccines become available. The US government is creating a stockpile of Tamiflu, but Osterholm writes in Foreign Affairs magazine that orders that have been placed globally suffice for just 40 million people.
The outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2003, which killed fewer than 1,000 people but cost Asia $40 billion in economic losses, should have served as a warning of the devastating effect an infectious disease can have even when loss of life is relatively small. The response of world leaders has been inadequate to the challenge.
posted by Aloyzio Achutti at 2:48 PM
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